Wooga

Wooga, a developer and publisher founded in 2009, suddenly gained widespread recognition both within and outside the German games industry four years later, when the then Chancellor, Dr Angela Merkel, visited the Berlin-based start-up and toured the premises of the social media and mobile games developer. For 13 years now, Wooga has been producing first-class games that make it onto every mobile phone, yet never feature on any ‘most-wanted games’ list. The fact that Wooga excludes no target audience is reflected both in the diversity of its workforce and in its game characters, an area where the Berlin-based company was a pioneer at a time when others hadn’t even considered the issue of diversity. Similarly, Wooga committed to climate protection at an early stage. The Berlin-based team are part of Leaders for Climate Action and Playing for the Planet, took part in the Green Game Jam and have been operating in a carbon-neutral manner since 2020. With turnover in the hundreds of millions, Wooga is something of a hidden – or rather, often overlooked – champion of the German games industry.

The 2022 DCP Jury