Good Trouble unveiled AbleToPlay an accessibility-first games discovery platform. It will launch March 10 to help gamers with disabilities find accessible games.
With the world’s-first Personalized Score system, AbleToPlay empowers gamers with disabilities and their families to instantly find games that fit their accessibility needs. Backed by the World Institute on Disability, AbleToPlay is pioneering innovative ways to find new favorite games no matter your needs, and it is available for sign up and early-access today.
Imagine you have a severe disability – how would you find out if a game has the accessibility features you need? For over 500 million gamers with disabilities globally, the answer to this question involves hours of research, unplayable purchases, and tons of frustration. It’s a continuation of a movement that Microsoft acknowledged in 2018 with the launch of the Xbox Adaptive Controller.
Arman Nobari, founder of a studio called Good Trouble, said the company originally set out to make hyper-accessible games, inspired by his own battle with cancer earlier in life.
“My friends in the hospital couldn’t escape with games like I could, so I set out to make games for them,” he said in a blog post. “As part of that process we started thoroughly researching accessibility in existing games. While analyzing what games are accessible to players with specific disabilities, we suddenly realized there was a major opportunity to tackle this problem from another perspective.”
He said that instead of only adding games to the pool of titles people can play, his team could also work to connect players to already existing games that fit their accessibility needs and preferences – and Good Trouble wanted to go about this in a totally new way.
“We spent a year doing R&D, talking with thousands of gamers with disabilities, talking with studios and publishers, and talking to major nonprofits like the World Institute on Disabilities, Child’s Play, and Games For Change, to develop and refine our vision,” Nobari said. “We built a team of award winning game developers, accessibility experts, and disability advocates. And finally, we built and tested prototypes, got feedback from our incredible community, and ultimately landed on the version that is live today.”
Nobari said the vision is to be the absolute best way to discover games that fit your needs and preferences, and the year ahead will show how it has made monumental progress.
“Simply put, if you’re looking for a new game, we want to be that trusted resource,” Nobari said. “For gamers, we’re bringing our simple at-a-glance accessibility scores to more sites and platforms, making it easier than ever to see if a game is right for you with unmatched clarity and fairness. For developers and publishers, we’re launching new ways to reach and connect with gamers who need accessible games – before, at, and after launch.”
Nobari said everything ultimately comes down to whether or not AbleToPlay actually helps gamers with disabilities and their families find new favorite games to fall in love with.
“When we first started building, I was of course a mix of anxious and excited for the size of the problem we’re solving,” Nobari said. “But as users started trying it out, I realized what a powerful and helpful platform we’ve built for gamers. The impactful stories and heartfelt messages started adding up, so now we proudly have an entire section on our homepage of quotes from our users, for whom AbleToPlay was the missing piece in being empowered to find and play games with full confidence.”
