Fred Neuen, Annabel Schoellen, Daniel Klautsch and Monica Serban on the LVGA, indie hits, cosy science games and why everyone is secretly a gamer.

Video games are now the biggest entertainment economy on the planet, bigger than music and film combined, and Luxembourg is quietly building its corner of it. I welcomed four guests who each see it differently: Fred Neuen, president of the Luxembourg Video Game Association (LVGA) and the Luxembourg Film Academy; Annabel Schoellen, Secretary of videogames.lu; indie developer Daniel Klautsch of Team Iota; and game developer and environmental economist Monica Serban. I began this interview a reluctant gamer and left convinced I had simply never noticed I was one (in a very tiny capacity).

Fred founded the LVGA in 2024 on three pillars: developers, education and the events and e-sports scene. Expecting a handful of local names, he found a thriving ecosystem. Some Luxembourg studios already succeed abroad: Rooftops and Alleys has sold hundreds of thousands of units across PC, PS5 and Switch, while retro specialist Sebastien Kotzka sees his work in Japanese arcades.

If Fred is the structure, Annabel is the heartbeat. Through videogames.lu she runs the GamingCafé, a free, near monthly event built around the motto "spill mat," Luxembourgish for "play with us." She was candid about the abuse women still face online, recalling comments like "go back to the kitchen" while leading raids in Guild Wars 2. Yet the room she describes is the opposite of the stereotype: wide ranging in age, increasingly female, and visibly welcoming to its queer crowd.

Daniel offered the founder's view. With BTS Game graduates Julie Fies and Steven Van Dorp, he formed Team Iota and released Sacrifice For Sale on Steam, then Switch, PS5 and Xbox. His hardest lesson was that making the game is the easy part, and that zero budget marketing is the steepest climb. The breakthrough came from collaboration, not cash.

On AI in coding, he offered a framing worth keeping:

"Treat it as a very enthusiastic intern. They will make progress fast, but the accuracy of it will not always be there." Daniel Klautsch

Monica made the case for games as a force for change. A screenwriter and lifelong gamer, she uses the cozy live sim format, in the spirit of Stardew Valley, for real scientific communication. In Scarletto Beetle and the Unseen World, built with the Museum of Natural History, the player is a ladybug learning how pollination and ecosystems work. After a Climate Futures game jam, she is now in a French German accelerator and heading to Gamescom in August.

What united all four was a sense of standing at a frontier, from gamified education, with professors already using Assassin's Creed to teach history, to the harder questions of addiction and manipulative design. Fred's boldest dream is a curated, Cannes style festival for games, hosted in Luxembourg, possibly next year.

"We are all pioneers right now. It's like the Wild West, something to explore." Fred Neuen His definition of a gamer is wide enough to include his own mother, who plays daily Sudoku on her phone. On paper, he admitted, she games more than he does, and I suspect the same is quietly true of many of us.

Links and where to follow the guests

LVGA (Luxembourg Video Game Association)
https://www.lvga.lu

Fred Neuen, president of LVGA and the Luxembourg Film Academy
Radar: https://thisisradar.com
FDI Group: https://www.fdi-group.eu
Luxembourg Film Academy: https://filmakademie.lu

Annabel Schoellen, Secretary of videogames.lu
https://videogames.lu/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/videogameslu

Daniel Klautsch, indie game developer, Team Iota
Team Iota on X: https://x.com/TeamIotaGames
Team Iota on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/teamiota.bsky.social
Press kit: https://team-iota.klautsch.lu/press/
Sacrifice For Sale on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2809090/Sacrifice_For_Sale/

Monica Serban, game developer and environmental economist
LinkedIn post on the Science Center event: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/maria-monicaserban-2a085419_climatechange-euclimatepact-biodiversityactivity-7435435012902039552-QABg

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