Gaming is a lifeline: why the number one Make-A-Wish request type is video games

Make-A-Wish sorts every wish into four kinds: to go, to meet, to be, or to have. Travel still wins overall. But when a child anywhere in the world asks to have something, the number one request is gaming, and it has been roughly since home consoles became a thing.

April Stallings manages the charitable gaming program at Make-A-Wish International, the arm of the organization covering 43 countries and more than 650,000 wishes granted since the first one in Arizona 47 years ago. The program she runs just turned five. Her argument, across an hour with Greg Posner and Lewis Ward, is that the games industry keeps misreading why those wishes get made, and badly overestimates what it would cost to help.

Gaming crosses three of the four wish categories

The obvious one is to have. The Nintendo Switch is the most-wished-for console, and a gaming bedroom redecoration, LED lights and all, is a common ask. Device preference shifts by region: mobile dominates in Southeast Asia, so wishes there skew toward handhelds and smartphones.

The other two are the ones studios underestimate. To meet now routinely means a content creator or a development team rather than an athlete or an actor. One child asked specifically to meet the team at Arrowhead. To be covers the kids who want to be a game developer when they grow up, which quietly turns a wish into a first look at a career.

That last category is the one Stallings keeps returning to. Wishes get kids thinking about the future and what comes after their illness, which is a different kind of value than a console in a box.

The reason is connection, not hardware

Asked whether there is a common why behind gaming wishes, Stallings answered with a single word. The mechanism behind it is specific: cross-platform play keeps immunocompromised kids connected to friends and family when treatment wrecks their immune systems and forces them into isolation. They can build a whole world of their own when the real one has narrowed to a hospital room.

The framing is worth sitting with, because it inverts the usual mental-health conversation about games. In this telling games are not the boogeyman. They are the thing holding a child's social world together while the physical one closes in.

Make-A-Wish now has the data, not just the stories

For a long time the case for a wish was anecdotal. A few years ago the organization put real resources into a data-driven research study, measuring emotional wellbeing, family togetherness, health outcomes, and optimism about the future, captured pre-wish and post-wish for both the child and the family.

The shift lands in the high 90th percentile, and medical outcomes for children who receive a wish come out better than for children who do not. Make-A-Wish is now presenting those findings at pediatric oncology conferences, arguing for a wish as part of treatment rather than a nice thing that happens next to it. The impact data sits under the Our Impact section at worldwish.org.

For anyone in games who has tried to defend player wellbeing work internally without numbers, that is a useful precedent. The intangible got measured, and the measurement changed who was willing to take the meeting.

Studio buy-in still means hearing no far more than yes

Stallings is blunt about the funnel. Almost twenty years in nonprofit fundraising, five of them running this program, and the answer is usually no. Large studios are the harder case, not out of hostility but because organizational complexity makes the right person hard to find. Indies are more flexible and more grassroots, with correspondingly thinner resources.

She also names the thing that kills the conversation before it starts. People see her name land in the inbox and do not open it, because they are afraid they will have to say no. Her advice is to stop being scared of the conversation and just have it.

The counterexample, which she calls the easiest fundraising moment of her career, came from New Blood. CEO Dave Oshry reached out unprompted, ran a birthday-month percentage of sales in February, and made New Blood the biggest games industry donor to Make-A-Wish International at $100,000. By her own description, New Blood's catalogue is not obviously brand aligned with a children's charity. That turned out not to matter.

The entry price is lower than most studios assume

The industry giving program starts at $5,000 and goes up from there. Stallings is deliberate about not pricing anyone out, and about giving the same recognition and stewardship regardless of the number. When money is not possible, the currency is access:

• Game codes. Cozy Up for Wishes, the June bundle now in its third year, asked for an inventory of 2,500 codes per game and cleared $100,000.
• Developer time. Arrowhead pulled a good part of its Helldivers team off deadline for a full day on a call with a child who could not travel, and his friends.
• Studio access. The Mojang team in Stockholm hosted a child for a day, including the stage where the reveals are filmed.
• Introductions. Games runs on who you know, and Stallings rates a well-timed introduction as highly as a check.

Cozy Up is a good model for how light the ask can be. Roughly 20 games from small indie studios and midsize publishers, curated by Make-A-Wish rather than listed on Steam, weighted toward titles under two years old with positive or overwhelmingly positive ratings. The 2,500-code cap is set deliberately so it cannot dent a studio's sales cycle. Roll for Wishes, the tabletop equivalent, runs the whole of October in its fourth year, with a signature creator stream each week and a TTRPG bundle in the works.

The people already doing this are not who you would guess

The European Speed Runners Association, based in Sweden, brings people together twice a year and raised $60,000 at its most recent event, approaching $200,000 across three years of fundraising. The events are gloriously niche: someone playing Doom on a flip phone, or a game whose entire mechanic is poking a penguin.

The organization runs on 27,000 volunteers worldwide. Make-A-Wish Chile covers an entire country with two paid staff. Stallings reads the reason volunteers and celebrities keep coming back as the giver getting filled up too, and says it has to work that way or nobody sustains it. Her example is John Cena, who has granted more than 650 wishes, and a child in Belgium he built a dossier on before the visit and then greeted in flawless French.

The ask: gaming needs its heart back

Asked what player driven means to her, Stallings did not talk about players. She talked about the industry mislaying something: a reset on being a good global citizen, giving back to the community, and giving employees a chance to be engaged in something larger than themselves. She wants that back at the grassroots level of gaming.

Her practical answer to what a studio or creator can do right now was four things: give money, give time, give access, give connections. The softer one underneath it, aimed at everyone who has left that email unopened, is that the conversation itself costs nothing.

Roll for Wishes runs through October. Make-A-Wish International is at worldwish.org, and April Stallings is on LinkedIn.

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