By Patrick Garratt

Being a woman in the videogame industry isn’t easy. Rita Lebedeva, CEO of publisher Critical Reflex, adds that being a young woman who's genuinely passionate about playing games makes working in the sector more difficult still. It isn’t hard to understand the frustration she felt in the stereotypically male environments anyone with experience of videogames knows only too well.

"I didn't feel like I was being taken seriously," she says of previous roles, which included producer jobs at HypeTrain and My.Game. "And I wouldn't just attribute that to being a woman. I would also attribute that to being younger. When I was in a production role, I was in my early twenties."

She adds: "I often found myself being the champion and the voice of the developers in the room. And I didn't necessarily feel supported or even heard on why those things can be important, and why we're not supposed to just look at how much money there is on the publisher back-end in Steam."

In 2020, Lebedeva finally got bored of waiting for others to listen. She founded Critical Reflex, the publisher of subsequent indie hits such as Buckshot Roulette and No, I'm Not A Human. In her office, no one gets ignored.

"If you have something interesting, important, or something you're passionate about, just say it and it will be heard. It may be wrong – it may be really, really wrong – but it will be heard.

"Whenever we brainstorm, whenever we discuss things, it's mostly about making sure that every voice is heard, no matter how junior or senior, how old they are, or what kind of background they come from."

The inclusivity generated by this approach has led to Critical Reflex being seen as a safe option for marginal developers.

"When we're approached by teams that are female-led or led by non-binary people, they feel way more appreciated and supported," says Lebedeva, speaking from a glowing pink bedroom replete with geekery.

"But, on average, what I've heard the most is that people find it really refreshing to talk to me as a CEO, because I'm just very distinct from your average publisher CEO."

Taster menu

While Lebedeva’s mission may have been at least partially personal, her approach has resulted in sometimes spectacular success, specifically because the publisher’s editorial line is based on the undefinable and on curation rather than genre.

"[Most publishers treat] every game kind of like an à-la-carte entry on the menu," she says. "Every game exists separately, and they're marketed separately, and then sold separately, and then they're forgotten, also separately."

"I see [Critical Reflex] as almost like a seven-course dinner menu, where you enjoyed something bigger, something we internally refer to as a flagship title, but then there’s something that you’d probably just miss on the storefront. Something small, something surprising, something that can last an hour."

This Steam-led approach has worked. The publisher’s big horror hit, the brutal Buckshot Roulette, has now sold more than 10.5 million units on Steam. ("Just selling a lot of copies of a cheap game generally makes a lot of money. But let’s keep it a secret from the rest of the industry").

She gives a further example of 2024's Threshold, created by Julien Eveillé, getting a fresh wave of attention when Trioskaz's No, I'm Not A Human launched in 2025. Players have responded naturally to the publisher’s portfolio, allowing Critical Reflex to amass over 200,000 members on its Discord server and an enviable follower count on Steam.

"The metric we're internally most proud of is our number of followers on Steam itself," where more than 80,000 people watch Critical Reflex’s output.

"If anything, that just directly confirms that it works: people want to see what we come up with next."

Why publishers in 2026?

No media company pulls together communities of this size without good reason, and anyone asking whether developers still need publishers in 2026 should treat this as a bellwether. Of course developers don’t need "publishers": they need the right publisher. Lebedeva is firm on the belief that funding isn't the main hurdle to developers achieving high sales.

"I think the money itself is the most interchangeable part… For [publishers] that just stop their services at giving money, I think they may be fooling themselves on how good of a partner they can be.

"What should never be interchangeable is the expertise, and basically everything that comes after the product exists, as well as the platform that the publisher can create for themselves."

Signing to a herd-mentality distributor in the current climate, then, can easily spell a quick death for any game.

"[People] follow this boring-ass formula of: I'm gonna announce my game, then I'm gonna do a demo, then I'm gonna do a release-date announcement, and then, guess what? I'm going to launch the game and just pray."

The market is rewarding invention, trial and error, she says, and "relying solely on hot tips from LinkedIn on how to market your games is definitely not the meta."

She concludes: "It's just the Wild West. You try, and you can fail, but what's important is to learn from every failure you get."