Local Naarm (Melbourne) games community hub Sabby Gallery is aspiring to become a co-op. For the last four years Sabby has been located on Victoria Parade in Collingwood, replacing a former bánh mì shop, but is now looking to move into a bigger venue with the help of its local community and foster an organisation and space that offers an alternative to the corporatisation, exploitation and precarity of the larger videogame industry.
Sabby Gallery has been many things to many people over the years. Sabby began in 2022 with Sine and Richard Adem returning to Australia after living overseas and wanting to set up a community space as a replacement for Bar SK, which shut down in 2019. Maize Wallin then brought in Kay-Lynn Cavanagh as co-founder, who started by bank-rolling a space for a year and bringing in a range of local community members, ranging from local developers to Twitch streamers to art practitioners. The first year involved Sabby finding its identity and hosting various events like board game nights, gallery shows and game showcases, including one involving the Australian game Wayward Strand. After a year, Sine and Richard moved back overseas, and local developer Null expressed interest in stepping in. It is at this stage that Kay-Lynn Cavanagh describes Sabby shifting towards being run collectively by the community.
The next two years were defined by Sabby expanding its scope as a venue even further. Sabby has been a co-working space, a gallery, a location for events and a social space all wrapped up in one. It has hosted movie nights, game showcases, game jams, election watch parties, zine workshops, classes, union meetings, live performances, Beyblade tournaments and parties. It has also long been an unapologetically queer space. Maize Wallin describes Sabby as being a lot of different things to different people due to how diverse its patronage is; its community ranges from long-term industry professionals to artists to students to young trans people who have moved interstate and found Sabby to be their connection to community.
Until this year, Sabby has survived on the back of the funds, time and energy of a generous owner alongside volunteer work and donations. However, given the lack of long-term stability this model provides, and the support Sabby has fostered, the community has decided to pursue becoming a co-op. A co-op, or co-operative, is a type of business structure that involves an organisation being owned and jointly run by its members who all collectively share in its benefits. This structure is more prevalent than people realise: 80% of Australians are members of a co-op already, according to the Australia Institute. Co-ops have also been found to benefit productivity and survivability, given how they foster worker investment in their jobs and institutions, and offer alternatives to business ventures that are unwilling or unable to pursue private investment.
Co-founder of Sabby and veteran audio programmer, Maize Wallin, has seen the Australian industry go through many phases, ranging from the post-global financial crash of local AAA studios to the emergence of indie and artistic not-games to the beginning of unionisation via the founding of Game Workers Australia (GWU). Amidst the current decline of tech capitalism and the larger games industry, including the recent layoffs at Microsoft, they see Sabby as both an alternative and a potential next step for gamemaking. “I’m really excited about the future that Sabby helps to present as part of this worldwide movement toward community and worker-owned games infrastructure. I feel like this is the next step for our industry, and I am thrilled to be a part of it”.
“Co-ops are where the world is moving to, and we’re seeing mutual funds and we’re seeing pooling of resources all around the world, and this happening in Victoria is such a massive symbolic step – though not just symbolic, it’s also tangible. They show that our local industry is moving forward… This is what we need to secure the future; we need community, we need to invest in each other, and this is one extra drop in that bucket.”
Sabby’s community sees the opportunity to become a co-op as a way of sustaining its existence into the future, as well as allowing them to rent a larger building and offer more opportunities and resources to its members. It is also a matter of survival; Sabby co-founder, artist and streamer Kay-Lynn Cavanagh says that if Sabby is unable to find 100 members to invest in it as a co-op before the 16th of August, their current lease will run out in October and the gallery will be forced to close.
“We need community, we need to invest in each other, and this is one extra drop in that bucket.” – Maize Wallin
Cavanagh describes being a co-op as “so important. In a lot of businesses and community spaces, people can experience such burnout because it can be difficult to do, and there are a lot of moving parts. I’ve seen both businesses, whether they’re self-run or big, and spaces die out because there are only a few people who are trying to keep things going, and it’s not sustainable. So when I see a co-op beat that, it’s because a larger number of people are working together on it, supporting it, and it’s a bigger community working on and building it together.”
Sabby’s website is full of testimonials as to the effects the gallery has had on local artists and game makers. Local developer Ben Koder describes Sabby as giving him the space “to grow as both an individual creator, as well as a valued member in this community”. Many others describe Sabby as a supportive space for fostering valuable feedback amongst peers. Maize talks about a Sabby work-in-progress night where they were presenting their studio Weird Flex’s VicScreen Originate Games application, a funding opportunity that other game makers were not even aware of. The night led to developer Quinn Franks going for, and being successful in receiving, the same funding for their first game.
Sabby is also connected to similar co-working spaces across the world, most notably Boshi’s Place in New York City, with whom they recently conducted a cross-continent working event. Developer Duncan Corrigan describes Sabby as facilitating a “cultural shift within the volatile landscapes that games and art are entrenched in. This leads to a greater diversity of artists putting art out and enriching our world for the better, while supporting the longevity of a healthy and culturally rich community of practice”.
For those interested in joining, co-op membership comes with a range of benefits, including being allowed to use the gallery space outside of staffed hours, access to Sabby’s technology library as well as technical support, the ability to hold events there for free and general access to its peer support network and capacity to become more involved with the community. Both Wallin and Cavanagh emphasise the importance of transparency to Sabby as a co-op – the minutes for every meeting, the roles, tasks and financial decisions are all open and available on their Discord.
More information can also be found on Sabby’s website, including the different tiers of support that members can contribute.
Sabby will also be hosting a range of information and funding events leading up to their 16th August deadline, including an in-person co-op seminar on Tuesday the 15th of July, an online seminar on the 22nd of July and the ‘Save Our Sabby’ livestream on their Twitch and YouTube channels from the 4-8th of August.
About the Author
Cass Barkman
she/they
Cass is a lecturer in Media and Communications at The University of Melbourne with a personal/academic love for experimental narrative videogames, complex cinema and having a little nap.
