Focus needs to be on how the British video games industry can nurture home-grown talent - Jamie Sefton

Given the sector prides itself on innovation, companies in our region continue to produce excellent titles – Leeds-based Red Kite Games for example helped to develop one of the biggest-selling titles of the year in Hogwarts Legacy. In the UK, the games industry is huge – the UK Consumer Games Market Valuation showed the game consumer market in 2022 was £7.05bn. Globally it’s estimated at over 200 billion.

No wonder PM Rishi Sunak recently lauded the games industry for helping level up the economy. After all, most of the industry is outside London – and in Yorkshire and The North, we have some of the biggest game studios making some of the greatest games – Team17 in Wakefield made Worms, Revolution in York made Broken Sword to name a few. Focus now needs to be on how we can nurture home-grown talent.

We have 16 universities and colleges that are part of Game Republic – a network that works hard to support the games industry here. Every year we run a Student Showcase and are blown away by the talent coming from our educational partners like the University of Huddersfield, Sheffield Hallam University, University of Leeds, University of Hull and more. This year the showcase will be hosted at the University of Bradford.

Final year students showcase their work which is judged by leading companies. They go on to gain employment, with 81 per cent of the winners we tracked from the last decade, staying in the North. Our companies get so much out of this - judging the work on design, narrative, storytelling, audio, art and animation and teamwork.

Pitstop Productions established in 1997, and with its HQ in Barnsley, are sponsors of the Student Showcase this year. Last year they announced the creation of 50 new jobs with the development of their Sound Creation Centre. They will need a pipeline of talent to come through over the coming years and that is just one example of the many employment opportunities strengthening our economy and communities.

We are fortunate to have excellent games courses and tutors in Yorkshire and the North, but more resources are needed in this growing sector. Games courses in Higher and Further Education need to be fully recognised for what they contribute to society as well as the regional and UK economy. Long gone are the days where people like my dad would say ‘You’ll never get anywhere playing games’. There are huge opportunities here, so I hope every Vice-Chancellor is taking note to invest in this discipline – in particular, teaching a new generation of developers to lead our industry forward. With such an incredible cluster of expertise, Yorkshire and the North has the potential to become a centre of excellence in game development education.

It's not just our educational institutions that are making us proud – Sumo Digital based in Sheffield has an academy helping people find pathways into the sector giving them opportunities to learn or retrain hands-on. The industry is also becoming more inclusive and diverse, with more initiatives targeted at bringing people from a wide range of backgrounds into industry. York University is leading work on improving inclusivity with the Screen Industries Growth Network (SIGN) supporting organisations to be more inclusive in events and workplaces. Diversity is a key part of innovation and it is great to see initiatives focus on inclusion.

Ukie (the leading industry body for our sector) has called on the UK Government to “Shore up the talent pipeline to enable new entrants into the sector through a £2.6m Games Trainee fund”. All of this should be actioned. Until this year, it had been 10 years since any funding for training had been made available to games companies in our region. It was fantastic to work with Screen Yorkshire this year on Next Level, a project that supported individuals in the creative industries to access training and develop skills like management, legal and budgeting.

When technology is moving so fast, companies need to be able to learn fast, adopt and adapt. In the Virtual Reality space, we have incredible companies working on this like XR Games, Cooperative Innovations and Just Add Water. Keeping up with new technology is expensive and risky at times, which is why public support and money is needed.

The sector can produce a high return on investment when it gets the tools and talent right – more public sector support will simply equip more companies at all levels with the right tools and talent to grow. That can only be a good thing for the UK and with over 1,000 games companies in Yorkshire and the North – it could be just the start of more great things for our region. As for Game Republic, we will be doing all we can to improve the connections, network and talent to continue to support our incredible games industry to succeed and keep growing.

Jamie Sefton is managing director of Game Republic.