Womenize! Wednesday Weekly is our weekly series featuring inspirational women from games and tech. For this edition we talked to Charlene Lebrun, Director & Publicist at Player Two PR Ltd. in London. Read more about Charlene in this interview:
Hi Charlene! As Director & Publicist at Player Two PR Ltd., what are your main responsibilities and challenges from day to day?

Every day is different! Some of it revolves around running the company itself, guiding my team and handling business development, but also mucking in and running campaigns: from writing press releases, discussing certain games with journalists and content creators, to coming up with strategies for each title we look after, not to mention managing booths at events (although not this year!) and running Kickstarter campaigns. I also spend some time every day liaising with our clients and making sure their release has the best chance of success, which sometimes means helping with QA, finding contractors for them or giving feedback on the game itself. There’s never a dull day, and indie games can be a hard sell no matter how good they are, but that challenge is part of why I enjoy it.

Having worked in both, the triple A world and indie games industry, are there any major differences or similarities that you’ve identified?

There are a few! A bit like in every field, working with smaller companies you tend to wear many different hats and work closely with everyone, while in AAA you have much larger teams working on each project as well as a stronger hierarchy of people to work with, so things tend to be a bit slower and safer. That said, in AAA the budgets are much larger and that allows both the devs and the marketing to execute bigger ideas, which is also really exciting! There are also similarities of course, in the general life cycle of development and the different elements needed around it to make a release work. 

You are also an active Women in Games Ambassador. Which values are important to you and where do you wish to raise more awareness?

I’d like to see the games industry become more diverse. Things are better than they were a few years ago and communications is an area of the industry where women are more represented, but I hope that someday soon, we can see true diversity (on all accounts, not just for women but for everyone) in the industry and for it to be considered normal. If the recent accounts of sexual harassment (and how those situations were handled by management) proved anything, it’s that we still have a long way to go in creating welcoming spaces to work in. The way I see it, it starts with bringing in a more diverse workforce and making employers accountable for treating them well.

Thank you for your time, Charlene!

Charlene’s Links: Charlene’s Twitter | Player Two’s website

WWW Feature by Sophie Brügmann