Hi ghosties,

2026 has been our biggest year yet and you may have spotted Baby Ghosts popping up across Canada to spread the word about cooperatives.

But before we get to that, let’s take a moment to feature all of the phenomenal Baby Ghosts alumni and their released and upcoming games:

• Cohort 6 team Mistik Studios launched a Steam page for their cozy life-sim RPG Kitch Witch

• Cohort 6 team Studio Mopot made a 2D point-and-click photography simulation game for the Toronto Game Jam called Say Cheese!

• Cohort 6 team Clip Through Interactive has been sharing the dev of their roguelike pinball game on socials — and you can play it in early access now

• Cohort 6 team Void Blob Worker Coop has a demo out for their game The Inverted Spire and their game There Will Be Beauty is free to play now on itch

• Sofy Kabachek from Cohort 6 studio Misfit Theories announced their studio in an interview for GLAAD gaming. The team was also at XP Summit and behind the DEI or DIE Toronto Games Week event.

• Cohort 5 team Polyvale Studios has been traveling around sharing their game about money laundering, Dark Money

• Cohort 5 team Studio Wtchcrft shared a retrospective on playtesting for their game Fatemender

• Cohort 5 studio See in Red was at Game Expo in Toronto this March with their game Not the Right God

• Spritewrench studio who participated in Cohort 3 has a demo out for the point-and-click Caribbean folklore mystery game Duppy Detective Tashia

• Cohort 3 studio Amelore released a Steam page for their tile-based rhythmic strategy game REtreeRS

• Cohort 3 studio Cozy Comet Games has been sharing sneak peeks of their game: Otter Half

• Baby Ghosts Peer Supports Rocket Adrift announced their survival horror game SHE: Seraphim Helix Experiment at the Fellow Traveller Story Rich Showcase

Co-executive director eileen was in Toronto for XP Summit on a panel about the future of games funding in Canada. The answer? We don’t know! But we do have hopes that the industry can be more cooperative and sustainable.

We often encourage game studios to plan for revenue diversification and not put all their eggs in one funding basket, such as hunting down a publisher or only depending on CMF funding.

This is also where we secured the domain coop.cool, a website with FREE resources and tools for building your very own coop. Sign up for the newsletter to receive some exciting news very soon!

XP Summit Toronto was also a chance for eileen, Board Director Nia St Nicolous, and project administrator Maggie McLean to meet in person!

eileen was also at the XP Summit in Halifax for a fireside chat with George Greer (Besszong) around building cooperative studios.

Following the Ubisoft Halifax closure, many devs across the Atlantic have been more and more interested in cooperative studio models. This led to the start of Game Makers 4 Cooperative Futures, a cooperative knowledge-sharing and support network. (We love more coop resources!)

But two cities is not enough! eileen also made an appearance at the Winnipeg Game Collective’s Pecha Kucha night where they got to deep dive into their love of Spiritfarer (and what it can teach us about building a game studio!)

There were so many great talks, including a hand-drawn presentation on the benefits of self-teaching by Taq Yoneda and game score motifs by Tamir Moore-Freedman.

Manitoba also recently experienced a blow when Ubisoft Winnipeg closed. Fortunately, Baby Ghosts has received sector development support from the Canadian Media Fund for some prairie-specific programming we hope can offer some support to devs during this difficult time.

What this recent travel shows is that there is a lot of desire for a different kind of games industry, and plenty of need for cooperative and studio development education like we offer.

Finally, Baby Ghosts hosted a roundtable and showcase as a part of Toronto Games Week called “No Bosses! Real Talk from Cooperative Game Studios.”

Despite the heatwave (even the fan said "no more!"), we welcomed 50 attendees to our round table discussion and game showcase.

Attendees asked great questions and kept conversation going after the panel, proof that "how do we build games in worker-focused ways?" is a question many folks are eager to explore.

Thank you to our partners for the No Bosses! event: Toronto Games Week, the Toronto Public Library, Toronto Workforce Funder Collaborative, the City of Toronto, and Ontario Creates.

We’re so grateful to everyone we met on our travels and are so excited to keep building these cooperative foundations across Canada!

Until next time,

- eileen & Jennie & Maggie

P.S. You can support the work we do (and receive a tax credit) by donating here.