The Gang Studio: keeping benefit uptake above 50% in a smaller studio

When The Gang Studio broke out of games studio The Gang as its own R&D shop, it needed its own benefits setup without the base fee of a card platform or a return to spreadsheets. Here is how it kept uptake above 50% and brought learning into the same place.

The challenge

The Gang is an independent games development studio operating across several European countries. As a single entity, the company had already learned something important about benefits: visibility drives uptake. Before it had any formal wellness solution, use of the wellness allowance sat at around 30%, managed fully by hand, with employees submitting receipts.

The Gang then signed up with a card-based wellness solution, which also gave employees visibility of their budget. Uptake jumped to over 50%.

Then the company restructured, and its R&D side broke out as The Gang Studio, its own company of 25 to 30 employees that needed its own benefits setup. The card solution had worked well at the larger scale, but its pricing included a high base fee that did not make economic sense for a team that size. And even when it worked well, the team still had admin headaches whenever the card could not be used, something that caused great frustration across the teams.

If no cost-effective solution could be found, the fallback was to go back to collecting receipts and tracking them in spreadsheets: the exact setup they had already moved away from.

The Gang Studio needed:

• A cost structure that worked at 25 to 30 employees without a prohibitive base fee.
• Visibility for employees, the feature they knew drove uptake.
• Minimal admin, to avoid going back to manual tracking.

And as a bonus:

• Enough flexibility to bring their separately managed learning and development (L&D) budget into the same platform.

The solution

The relationship started informally. Caroline, CEO of CLVR Benefits, and Katherine, at the time HR Manager at The Gang, met at an event. That connection led to early conversations about mapping the company's situation before any commercial discussion.

Together we worked through what the platform could look like for The Gang Studio specifically: how the wellness and learning funds would operate, what the cost structure would look like at their size, and how the move away from card-based expensing would work in practice.

After several conversations, we built a prototype for The Gang Studio and presented it to their CEO, who gave the go-ahead for implementation.

The results

The Gang Studio came into the platform with a clear baseline. With nothing in place, use of the allowance sat at around 30%. The card solution had pushed that above 50% simply by showing employees what they had left to spend. The question for the new platform was whether it could hold that, at a cost that made sense for a company its size.

The added dimension was the L&D fund. Because the per-employee training budget had already been allocated, bringing it into CLVR Benefits needed no new spend. It gave employees one place to see both allowances and spend them on what mattered. Employees bought games, attended gaming conferences and picked up AI tool licences. On paper that might look like leisure. In a studio where craft is the product, it is not: game designers who play other studios' work come back with ideas, and the studio actively encourages it.

Key outcomes

"It wasn't a huge budget, but it was really interesting to see what people chose to spend it on. You can see they're using it for the purpose: buying games, AI tools, going to conferences. That is craft development. That's exactly what we want."

Katherine Siano, Head of People, The Gang Studio