If there’s one big step forward in accessibility marketing that I would love to see in 2026, it would be the introduction of accessibility tags to physical video game box art.
Earlier this year in March 2025 we saw the reveal of the Accessible Games Initiative, a collective of multiple big name game publishers coming together to create standardised names, definitions, and developer guidance for a set of video game accessibility tags.
Starting with 24 initial tags, the initiative aimed to standardise language so that disabled players would know what to expect when a video game offered specific kinds of accessibility support, and developers had consistent advice on when to apply each tag to their games.
In the eight months since the tags were first revealed to the world we’ve seen numerous moves toward their wider adoption, with companies like Xbox and PlayStation updating the names of their accessibility tags on their digital storefronts to match these new agreed terms and definitions, which is wonderful forward progress for video game accessibility.
However, I think it’s time for the next step. I think it’s time we start adding these standardised accessibility tags to physical game boxes, not just console digital game storefronts.
The same way that game boxes in many countries allow you to take a look at the back and at a glance know what kinds of age rated content a game contains, I dream of a future where a disabled gamer can flip over a physical retail box for a game and find out if they’re going to be able to play that game with their specific disabilities.
As much as this might initially sound like an ambitious thing to wish for in the video game industry, particularly wishing for it as early as next year, it’s not without precedent. Back in the early 1980’s video game publisher Atari introduced the “special features” section to the back of video game box art design. While not formally standardised or required on the back of every Atari 2600 game box, the Special Features section when present on games was designed to advertise what things that I would today consider accessibility features. Examples of this include making it known when a game featured reduced difficulty gameplay modes.
Now, I’m about to spend a lot of this article talking about the logistical hurdles to implementing a standardised accessibility tag system on physical game releases. As such, I want to first take a moment to talk a little about why I think it’s important that the video game industry eventually take this step forward. It’s not necessarily going to be easy, but I do think there’s a lot to be earned if the industry makes the effort to give this a try.
We are at a point today where most major video game publishers are making a decent amount of effort to include at least some accessibility support in a decent percentage of their AAA video game releases. Messaging around accessibility support is far from perfectly consistent, but for disabled gamers purchasing digital video games online there’s a good amount of information available, often by launch day, to help make informed purchasing decisions. From accessibility focused game reviews, to accessibility tags on digital storefronts, the tools to know if a game is going to be accessible before purchase are becoming more common.
But the same is not true at physical retail. If a disabled gamer is in a GameStop for example and happens to see an interesting looking game, they’re not going to know at a glance if it’s going to be accessible for them or not.
While digital game stores are on the whole pretty good about offering refunds for games that are inaccessible for a disabled player, if that’s reported within a short playtime of downloading the title, a physical game store is often less likely to give you a full refund for your purchase price if you’ve opened a game and put the disc in your console to find out if it’s accessible for you or not. You’ve reduced the value of the “new” copy by opening it at that point.
Also, stepping back a little from the core gamer experience, let’s say you’re a parent of a disabled child looking to buy them a christmas present for example. You’re not necessarilly going to know that there’s accessibility tags available if you book up their console and check the digital storefront. At a glance, it would be great if that parent could take a look at the box and know if the game is likely to be playable for the disabled person in their life that they hope to purchase this as a gift for.
This is only a small snapshot of examples, but I hope it makes my point – There are numerous benefits to including accessibility tags directly on video game box art, if we as an industry were to take that step forward.
Now, I fully acknowledge, there are some hurdles the industry would need to overcome if we were going to standardise accessibility tags being a part of game box art the same way that age rating category information is.
Perhaps top of this list is that these accessibility tags are currently voluntary, with no one governing body overseeing the accuracy of their application to games. We could advocate for the creation of such a group, but that would obviously be a big ask of the video game industry, and I doubt we have the momentum to push for something like that at this time, at least in the short term.
In a perfect world, if we wanted to go for that approach, we could push for something like the formation of an independent committee of disabled gaming accessibility consultants, perhaps employed directly by the ESA (the Entertainment Software Association), to play through games and assess their suitability for specific Accessible Games Initiative standardised tags. The ESA already runs the ESRB, which handles game age and content ratings in the United States, and they’re heavily involved in the creation of the Accessible Games Initiative. If they wanted to, they could use some of their position of authority in the North American games industry to push for this kind of adoption of these accessibility tags on physical game releases.
I don’t think it’s likely that the above will happen, but it’s a path forward that such a development could theoretically follow.
The Accessible Games Initiative’s developer guidelines document does a pretty good job of laying down specific guidance for the use of each of their tags, but there are edge cases that will sometimes fall outside of their one size fits all guidance, and at present there is no one group that adjudicates edge case scenarios, or who you can report incorrectly applied accessibility tags to. As such, the accuracy of these tags needs to be treated with a sensible level of caution. This is already true for their use on digital game storefronts to an extent, but would obviously be a bigger factor to consider when printing these tags onto physical game boxes which cannot be easily updated if an error is flagged.
On the note of physical box art being semi-permanent, the potential roadblock to implementing accessibility tags on game box art is the frequency with which video games add accessibility support in post release patches, rather than having accessibility present on day one. Even publishers like PlayStation, who are good at having accessibility ready for day one, often add at least some of that day one accessibility via a downloadable patch. There are a number of examples I can point to of PlayStation games, for example, where if you play the PS5 disc version without downloading the day one digital patch, a number of key accessibility features will be missing.
While this is not a huge practical issue, most PS5 owners for example can download a day one patch before playing with relative ease, I suspect you might run into false advertising issues if you were to list accessibility tags on a game box that were not by default accessible on the offline playable disc build of the game. This would potentially limit the number of tags that could appear on a game’s box art, reducing them to fewer tags than might apply to the real world day one version of the game.
If we’re thinking big picture, maybe this encourages game developers to prioritise getting their accessibility features ready and implemented in time for disc production rather than the day one digital patch so that they can have more features listed on the back of the box, but if not that is a limitation of physical box art featuring accessibility tags that would need to be considered.
And we can’t ignore the elephant in the room – Physical game sales are diminishing in relevancy. That’s not to say they’re not still important, particularly in certain regions, but they are not the behemoth that they once were. In fiscal year 2025 for example, physical game sales apparently made up only around 3% of total revenue for PlayStation as a publisher. There are platforms where physical game sales are still much higher, Nintendo for example still sees pretty solid physical game sale numbers, but any kind of update to physical game box design that I’m aiming to advocate for will have to overcome a degree of apathy from those who write off the sector as not worth worrying about as a market for accessibility improvements.
I know I’ve spent a lot of this article so far explaining the reasons why this idea might struggle to get off the ground, but I want to be clear, I do think there is a path forward that we could see as early as the next 12 months, that might open the door to wider industry adoption of this kind of accessibility messaging on physical game box art design.
A first step to seeing this support might look something like the example I gave at the start of this discussion, Atari’s “Special Features” box labels.
Rather than pushing to jump straight to an industry mandated approach involving an oversight committee and full industry adoption, I would love to see a single video game publisher with a solid track record of accessibility in their first party published titles take the plunge and standardise including the Accessible Games Initiatives tags (as well as any of their own that the AGI doesn’t have an equivalent for) on their back of box designs.
I think a great candidate for this would be a publisher like PlayStation, but any publisher could be the first to try rising to this challenge. Using PlayStation as an example I would love to see them include a dedicated area on the back of PS5 game box art, always in the same location, simply listing the accessibility tags that they’ve applied to their game, matching the tags that they’ve applied to their game on the PSN store (a mix of the AGI tags and some of their PSN specific additional accessibility tags).
You could perhaps underneath have a small disclaimer to the effect of “Some features will require a day one update” or “Check PSN for an updated list of accessibility tags” to mitigate post launch updates or features that are not implemented by the time that the disc or box art went to print.
As one of the signatories of the Accessible Games Initiative, and one of the first companies to make accessibility tags available on their digital storefront, I do think that PlayStation as an example would be pretty well positioned to accurately list appropriate tags on their box art. They’ve spent multiple years overseeing the accurate implementation of accessibility tags for games published on their own digital store from other publishers, they’re an example of a company who is probably positioned to be able to apply these tags on physical box art with minimal risk of a tag being applied incorrectly or inaccurately.
I genuinely believe that if one game publisher were to take the leap and start publishing their accessibility tag lists on the back of their game boxes, they would likely see a huge amount of positive news coverage for the move, and put inherent pressure on the rest of the industry to follow suit.
I don’t believe the industry is going to apply accessibility tags to their game boxes under some unified regulatory body as early as 2026, but I do think that it would be very possible for a single publisher to take the leap and try to innovate in this space, increasing accessibility for disabled players looking to impulse purchase physical retail games in stores.
If someone disabled picks up a video game box on a shelf in a store, and can find out if that game’s likely to be accessible for them without having to go out of their way to look that information up on the internet, that’s a big deal. Taking up a little space on a physical game boxes to let disabled gamers know that they’ve been considered, showing them that you understand accessibility information is important to their purchasing choice, would be a really meaningful step forward for making accessibility information accessible anywhere and everywhere that people find new video games to purchase.
Doing something like this would do so much to normalise accessibility information for non disabled players. I love the idea for example of a non disabled gamer with a disabled friend being able to check the back of their game boxes in advance of hanging out together and grab a few games off the shelf that they’re confident they can play together with their disabled friend.
Physical video games aren’t quite dead yet, and I truly believe we could be doing more to make the act of purchasing a physical game in a store more accessible for disabled players.