Game on: The rise and rise of the gaming industry

Around one in six adults in the UK play video games, whether that be on smartphone, console or a computer. Yet how many of us have thought about where those games are made?  

In 2019, a report from the British Film Institute found the total GVA generated by all video games developed, published and sold in the UK to be £5.12 billion. 

By 2021, according to data from UKIE, this had risen to £7.16 billion, and there is every indication this number is set to rise further.  

In the face of the current economic turbulence, games sales are one of the few sectors to see continued growth, which is bound to see more people entering the sector. 

Into Games is a non-profit organisation which aims to connect hundreds of learners, from all backgrounds, with those already working in the industry. 

As its CEO, Declan Cassidy, puts it: “When times are difficult, people like to escape, and games are a perfect way to do that”. 

Declan’s views are backed up by statistics. The UK Safer Internet Centre found that 58 per cent of eight to 17-year-olds said playing games online had a positive change in their mood, 59 per cent said it made them feel good about themselves and 71 per cent said it made them feel more relaxed and happier.  

These positive effects are not limited to online games, either. A 2021 study from the Oxford Internet Institute found a positive relation between game play and effective well-being in players of EA’s Plants Vs Zombies: Battle for Neighbourville and Nintendo’s Animal Crossing. 

Along with playing games, the UK is also great at making them according to Sam Collins, Head of Commercial and Membership at UKIE, the games trade association in the UK. 

He said: “Games straddle the intersection of creative and technical capabilities and, for some reason, in the UK we’re brilliant at sitting between those things. Some countries are brilliant at specific areas like animation or design, but the UK, maybe it’s because of our hobbyist nature, is great at all of them”.

It is an industry driven heavily by smaller businesses, with 99.5 per cent of companies employing 250 people or fewer. As a whole, the industry nationwide only employs around 25,000 people.  

Those small numbers go a long way, however, with each person employed in the sector contributing approximately £121,000 of GVA to the UK economy, placing it at the top of creative industries in terms of economic contribution per head. 

According to data from UKIE, the trade body for the UK games and interactive entertainment industry, there are 378 games businesses active in the South East, making it the second most active region for the sector in the UK.  

While Guildford has a strong heritage in the industry dating back to the 1980s and featuring some of the biggest names in the industry such as EA, Ubisoft and Epic Games, Brighton, with around 72 firms, is the most popular area in the region for the games industry. 

Research from the BFI found that in 2019 the video games sector in the South East as whole generated £894.3 million GVA taking into account development, publishing and consumer sales. 

While this was actually the lowest GVA generated in the region in the three years the BFI study looked at, the subsequent growth in the industry during and following the pandemic means it is very likely this number has grown, possibly surpassing the £1 billion mark. 

Along with their economic impact, the video games sector is also a driver of innovation, a key theme of the Treasury’s “Build Back Better strategy”, with much of the technology created by the video games sector repurposed by other creative industries.  

The name for these technologies is “Virtual Production”, and it is an area the UK is a global leader in, attracting both domestic and international investment. Technology originally developed for the sector has, for example, been installed in Pinewood Studios and used in the production of Disney’s The Mandalorian to increase the volume of the stage.  

Another of these is Epic Games, the publishers of Fortnite with studios and offices across the UK, which created the Unreal engine that is used in animation in the TV and Film sectors to create photorealistic CG in real-time. 

Surrey - “The Hollywood of video games”

Dubbed “The Hollywood of video games”, Surrey, and Guildford in particular, has one of the largest clusters of video games studios in the UK, if not the world.  

In the late 1980s, two developers named Peter Molyneux and Les Edgar started Bullfrog Productions, gaining recognition in 1989 for their third game: Populous.  

In 1995 Bullfrog was acquired by its publisher Electronic Arts, with the fallout from the deal later spawning Molyneux’s Lionhead Studios, which would go on to create Black & White and Fable before being acquired by Microsoft in 2006.  

From these large studios came a number of smaller studios, notably among them Hello Games, founded in 2008, who created 2016’s No Man’s Sky, an action-adventure survival game which uses procedural generation to create more than 18 quintillion explorable planets, and Two Point Studios, known for their 2018 spiritual successor to Theme Hospital, Two Point Hospital and its 2022 follow-up Two Point Campus. 

Lauran Carter, Head of Communications at full-service creative production studio Liquid Crimson and founding member of Guildford.Games Limited, explained how Guildford has developed into the hub it is today.  

“The reason we see the number of studios we have is that, since the 80s, studios have made games, grown larger and larger, then shed. The shedding can come from knowing there’s a game down the line that maybe isn’t something you’re interested in making.  

“Then what we see is Guildford not just being a pocket in itself, but studios shedding once a project is finished with people deciding to start their own thing, and that small thing growing from being a very furtive project to becoming the Hello Games or Media Molecule we see today.” 

The size and history of the games industry is such that, if you’ve played a reasonable amount of games in the last few years, there’s a good chance at least one or two of them were made somewhere in Surrey. 

The ecosystem here is also supported by firms including Charles Russell Speechlys, which has one of its partners sitting on the board of Guildford.Games, along with the local offices of BDO and RSM.  

Sussex – a rising star

While Guildford has the history, Brighton has recently grown to become a major player in the UK Games industry. It has a greater concentration of smaller studios than Guildford, along with its annual Develop Brighton Conference which brings together studios from across the UK. 

Notable studios in the region include Horsham’s Creative Assembly, the developers of the Total War franchise which also worked on Alien Isolation and Halo Wars and Brighton’s FuturLab, creators of PowerWash Simulator, which is currently working with the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute to study the wellbeing of gamers playing their relaxing 2022 hit.  

Buzz Capital Services, a finance solutions firm focusing on advance funding tax credits for Video Games Tax Relief and Research & Development are also located here, offering the industry help with raising finance, and Into Games, a non-profit organisation focused on helping people from disadvantaged backgrounds find a career in the games industry.  

Hampshire – the dark horse?

An area perhaps less known for its games industry, Hampshire still has an active and exciting presence within the industry.  

Among the firms in the area is family-friendly publisher Outright Games, which has worked on intellectual properties including Peppa Pig, Bratz and Transformers.  

Bad Viking, based in south Hampshire, last year released the occult puzzle game Strange Horticulture, which sees the player running a local plant store with a dark mystery unfolding in the area around them. 

Also in Hampshire is Nick Parker Consulting, a veteran of the games industry who started at Nintendo in 1992 and has also worked for Atari and Sony. His firm offers market research, financial and business planning to the games, internet, television and mobile sectors and boast a client list including Microsoft, the BBC and Vodafone.  

Kent – small but perfectly formed

Kent boasts a number of smaller studios with strong histories in the industry. Among these is Dovetail Games, creators of railway simulation games such as 2022’s Train Sim World, which gives its players the chance to take control of a train traveling along different routes in Germany, the UK and many more.  

Bromley-based Splash Damage, formed in 2001, specialise in multiplayer first-person shooter games. The studio was originally formed by modders, people who modify existing games to change the way they play or add extra content. Splash Damage has since worked on franchises including Wolfenstein, Halo and Batman. The studio is currently working on a new Transformers game.  

Berkshire – home to some of the biggest names 

While less known for its specific studios, Berkshire is home to a number of the UK or European offices of some of the biggest names in the industry, with Microsoft in Reading, Nintendo in Eton and Activision Blizzard near Datchet all having a presence in the county.  

TT Games, a subsidiary of Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment, was established in Maidenhead in 2005, going on to create the popular Lego games, which have featured franchises including Star Wars, Harry Potter and Marvel.  

Code Wizards, based in West Berkshire, describe themselves as doing the ‘boring’ bits of videogaming, building and integrating esports platforms, backend services for analytics, payment multiplayer and more, and linking developers and publishers into retailers’ advertising sales channels.  

Oxfordshire – the home of Rebellion 

The biggest name in gaming in the Oxfordshire region is probably the behemoth Rebellion, who aside from a 30-year history publishing video games including the Sniper Elite, Zombie Army and Evil Genius series, have also branched out into the worlds of comics, books and TV & Film.  

Excalibur Publishing is a Banbury-based games company known for making simulator games for PC, Mac and VR, including train, driving and flying sims, along with a range of accessories and peripherals such as headsets and driving wheels.  

Also based in the county is SpecialEffect, a charity which helps to make gaming accessible to disabled people who may struggle to use traditional input devices. Among the help it offers is regular articles explaining how to make popular games like FIFA easier to play. 

Wiltshire’s gaming sector is small but active

While the county has relatively few games studios, it is testament to the reach of the industry that there are still a number of active, if smaller, studios in Wiltshire. 

Crooks Peak is a Calne-based developer specialising in virtual reality (VR) games. This one-man studio released Alien Extraction, a puzzle strategy game, on Steam and Meta Quest last year and is currently working on its next project titled By Grit Alone. 

Swindon-based Geek Beach has created a massively-multiplayer online (MMO) game which allows players to create a planet, build a fleet of warships, explore the universe and fight other players for the Apple and Google app stores.  

Dorset – untapped potential?

Perhaps overshadowed slightly by nearby Hampshire, Dorset still has a variety of businesses in the sector.  

One of these is Size Five, which along with creating its own BAFTA-winning games including Lair of the Clockwork God, The Swindle and Behold the Kickmen, offers narrative design consulting services to help other studios.  

coocoosqueaky is a Bournemouth-based studio which made Tears of Avia, a strategy RPG and turn-based tactics game for the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. 

An earlier version of this article attributed the figure of £7.16 billion to the BBC. While the BBC did report this figure, the data itself originally came from UKIE.