Why Healthcare Is Gaming’s Next Trillion-Dollar Market

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Feb 17, 2026

Sam Glassenberg, founder of Level Ex and veteran game developer who builds medical games to improve training and patient outcomes. He explains why modern game design beats superficial gamification. They discuss mapping medical problems to game genres, live-ops for fast clinical updates, playable ads and sponsorship business models, and the massive healthcare market opportunity for games.

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ANECDOTE

Guitar-Hero Style Therapy Fixed A Vision Problem

Sam built a Guitar-Hero–style convergence therapy game with his daughter that made exercises engaging and effective.
After regular short play sessions, his daughter improved and 'cured' her convergence insufficiency.

INSIGHT

Map Clinical Tasks To Proven Genres

Map clinical learning problems to proven game genres (puzzle, strategy, rhythm) instead of inventing mechanics.
Great game design is pattern-matching mechanics to the mental model clinicians need.

ADVICE

Bring Game Craft, Add Medical Experts

Hire experienced consumer game designers and pair them with MDs rather than asking clinicians to design games.
Keep the studio structure like any game studio and add a medical team for domain expertise.

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Medical training is still stuck in the arcade era: expensive, basement-bound simulators and outdated software that rarely capture the real stakes of clinical decision-making. In this episode, host Alexandra Takei, Studio Director at Ruckus Games, sits down with Sam Glassenberg, founder of Level Ex (now part of Relevate Health), to unpack how game developers can modernize healthcare learning by truly embracing the craft of video game design, not “gamification” lipstick. The opportunity and the market here are much bigger than you might assume. Healthcare is a trillion-dollar industry in the US alone, and if you can create products that save the medical system money while also growing the $200B video game industry, that’s a win-win.

The conversation explores why even mediocre games outperform traditional training (the bar is shockingly low), and how live-ops principles let teams update clinical guidance fast. The pair also discusses who plays these games, and it turns out that it’s not only doctors but “normal people” who have found these games on the app store. They go deep on design: mapping real clinical challenges to proven genres (diagnosis as reductive-reasoning puzzles, ventilators as rhythm games), and why domain experts often describe what’s hard for residents, not what triggers adrenaline for experts, which is the source of “fun” in games. Finally, Sam breaks down the business: sponsored content by clients like Pfizer and Merck, free-to-play for doctors gameplay, and playable ads.

We’d also like to thank Overwolf for making this episode possible! Whether you're a gamer, creator, or game studio, Overwolf is the ultimate destination for integrating UGC in games! You can check out all Overwolf has to offer at https://www.overwolf.com/.

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Sound design by Gavin Mc Cabe.