DeepWell DTx is a therapy-focused game studio from the co-founder of Devolver

Therapy has an engagement problem. Despite the benefits of treatment plans and at-home exercises, people generally resist anything that feels like work, and this impedes the mental-health recovery process across the board. Clinicians have attempted to bridge this gap with various devices and reward systems, but still, it’s often incredibly difficult to motivate patients to help themselves.

Video games have the opposite problem. Players can spend hours immersed in a single digital experience, seated in one spot and lost in their own world, but they’re often branded as “lazy” for this behavior. Video games are widely viewed as a waste of time, even with psychological benefits of play.

So, why not smash these industries together and see what happens?

DeepWell DTx isn’t about gamifying therapy tools or building digital experiences based on strict medical templates. Instead, the studio will analyze existing games for potential mental health benefits and, in some cases, work with interested developers to enhance these mechanics. The team will then secure approvals from regulators for these games to treat mental health issues including PTSD, anxiety, depression, OCD and addiction.

This is where Douglas’ expertise comes in. He’s the founder and former CEO of medical device company Nextern and he’s secured FDA approval for more than 25 medical devices over the past 15 years; he knows how to navigate this regulatory process and he sees games as a natural fit. He and Wilson started working on DeepWell about 18 months ago, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There’s a very specific regulatory pathway for this work,” Douglas said. “So, a couple key things — agencies have done a lot of work in the last couple years to figure out how software as a medical device and specifically digital therapeutics are going to work. The FDA has been collaborative in that work. And then in this emergency time, there has been more opportunity to do the work that we need to do to get these in people’s hands as quickly as possible. It’s arduous but not impossible.”

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Additionally, DeepWell DTx will provide a framework for players to recognize these benefits as they play — whether that’s a label on the game’s storefront, a welcome screen or another digital signal — allowing them to adjust their mindset before pressing start.

“We’re super excited largely because of some intellectual property Ryan filed long before he met me, a couple years before he met me,” Wilson said. “We believe we’ve got a system built to enable game developers — eventually other media creators, as well — to work their magic and in a way that is already quite beneficial.”

It takes one whole minute before Wilson drops the phrase “digital psychedelics” into the conversation. This is kind of his thing; he’s an evangelist for psychedelics, with endless can apply starting today. There’s also an in-house development arm of the DeepWell beast, and its first game is already halfway through development, with a few others in pre-production. The first DeepWell games are due to start rolling out in 2023.