Sector spotlight: gaming

Fact…

• There are 46 active gaming companies in Bristol according to UKIE, the Association for Interactive Entertainment, the 7th highest concentration in the country
• The UK was the 6th largest video game market in 2016 in terms of consumer revenues, after China, USA, Japan, South Korea and Germany.
• 68 per cent of UK games companies were founded since the beginning of 2010

COMPUTER GAMES

Gaming industries often cluster around super-sized ‘AAA’ studios. Bristol doesn’t have one, but a buoyant sector of medium and independent game companies has developed regardless, with names such as Ground Shatter, Large Visible Machine, Mobile Pie and Reach Robotics – which recently debuted, MekaMon, a novel, battling robot game – among the mob.

MekaMon – a game of battling robots

Ndemic Creations employs eight people at its headquarters on Spike Island and was recently ranked by the Sunday Times as the 72nd fastest growing tech company in the UK. Its flagship project – the original Plague Inc. game, available for mobile, PC, PS4 and Xbox One – has over 85 million players worldwide, making it the fifth most popular paid mobile game ever.

A recent crowdfunding campaign saw $700,000 pledged to make the launch of Plague Inc: The Board Game a reality, now available to buy on Amazon.

“It’s an incredibly exciting and challenging time to be making games,” says founder James Vaughn. “Video games is one of the fastest growing industries in the world right now, and our story shows that it’s possible to reach an extraordinary number of people without necessarily worrying about physical media at all. Everyone has a smartphone in their pocket and, thanks to App Store and Google Play, we can sell our game to millions of people all around the world at the touch of a button.”

Although finding the right talent – “as a niche developer it is always tough to find the right people” – and attracting attention in the gaming noise are the biggest obstacles.

“The industry is very competitive due to the number of people looking to make games so getting your game discovered by players is a big challenge,” James continues; “especially for smaller studios with limited budgets.”

Aardman Animations has developed an award-winning gaming studio alongside it’s famous animations, aimed largely at the family market. Over the last ten years, it has developed games for major companies including the BBC, Cartoon Network, Disney, Penguin Random House, Macmillan and the British Council. The latest projects include Hungry City, a web-based game developed as part of the Wellcome Trust’s campaign, The Crunch, which sets out to educate families about the future of food, health and environment; and Sustainable Shaun, an educational sustainability game developed as part of Bristol’s year as European Green Capital.

“Whilst all our games set out to entertain we are particularly inspired by creating games that actually make a difference – which educate, inspire or change behaviour in some way,” says head of interactive production Lorna Probert. “We strongly believe that the most effective way of achieving this is through making something fun.”

Lorna Probert from Aardman

Next, the company plans to use its gaming and VR expertise to bring ever more interactive products that bring experiences to life, especially in museums and family attractions.

Unusually, Lorna doesn’t see a major skills shortage in the sector, saying that great courses at UWE, Bath and Plymouth have helped grow some versatile talent. “We are lucky to be in a position to tempt people out of the big smoke or from overseas to our lovely city when we need.

“If there is any area where we have struggled more recently it’s moving out of the mobile game world into console. Companies in Bristol have tended to be more mobile/ online game focussed so to attract talent with console level experience we had to look further afield.”

Auroch Digital has offices at the Bristol Games Hub in Stokes Croft, a central hub supporting independent gaming companies as they grow, now with over 800 people in its community.

“The next of our projects to be hitting digital store shelves are our adaptation of Steve Jackson’s Ogre and our Games Workshop title Dark Future: Blood Red States,” says producer Peter Willington. “Both come to PC soon.

He says the studio has “gone from strength to strength” in the last 12 months. “We successfully designed, Kickstarted, and shipped a physical card game with our friends at political satire site Wonkette. We’ve also been actively working on a medium called ‘interactive documentary’ with our VR experience Jack the Ripper: Shadow Over Whitechapel which we showed the prototype for at London Book Fair 2017.”

He says there’s a lot going on in the city’s gaming community: “There are games in supermarkets, specialist games stores, retro enthusiast stores, and board game stores. There are meet ups focused on digital and physical games, as well as board game cafes and video game bars. Bristol’s a super playful place!” As a result, Peter says the industry in Bristol is “growing steadily” with “new markets to conquer, fresh technologies to tame, and specific types of games having a resurgence – VR, AR, physical games, digital experiences, strategy games…

“There are other areas around the UK that have a larger games industry, but you’d be hard pressed to find a more connected, friendly, or proportionally successful one.”

Force of Habit is a five-year old studio specialising in mobile games. “Our biggest bread-winner has been our debut game Toast Time – an arcade/action breakfast-defence (sausage and) mash-up where you play as a toaster and use the recoil of firing multitudes of bread to move around,” says founder Ashley Gwinnell. “It’s as zany as it sounds, and won a few awards. Put us on the map it did!”

INNOVATION AND SERVICES

Andy King is creative director at PlayWest, UWE’s not-for-profit games company which takes on commercial work, passing on real-world experience and pay to students and graduates. With seed funding of £15,000 the enterprise model turned over £500,000 in the first 18-months. “We want to help businesses innovate,” he explains. “We are more agile and cost effective than commercial developers, particularly for early stage conceptualisation, prototyping and proof of concept work.

“As a studio run by staff, students and graduates at UWE Bristol we have a real diversity of projects, from actual games through to games-technology powered software experiences,” he says.  “Our first game though set the tone for the games we like to create. It was a kick-ass side-scrolling 4 player beat-em-up created in just 48 hours during the Bristol European Green Capital Digital Challenge called ‘Super Trash Heroes’.”

The largest project currently is a game for the Horizon2020 research programme which aims to engage citizens in the development of environmental policies. “By playing the game you will literally be informing policy development for a given city. In 2018, the game will launch in Bristol, and then roll out across five other EU cities.”

He says the city’s two global game jams each year are indicative of a strong indie and SME scene: “the sheer energy and diversity of the attendees always leaves me in no doubt of the burgeoning scene in Bristol.”

Meanwhile Grrrl Games, hosted within the Bristol Games Hub, is a forum for women interested in game development and hosts monthly talks, practical sessions and discussions to encourage women into the sector.

Studio Diva produces artwork for gaming companies turning over around £1million annually. “At the tail end of last year we were delivering global retail marketing projects for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Destiny Rise of Iron, Destiny Collection and Skylanders Imaginators, as well European Digital Marketing campaigns for PlayStation VR and PS4 Pro,” says co-founder and director Suzy Barnes. “We currently employ 15 people in our Bristol office, although we’re constantly hiring to keep up with our pace of growth, so that figure is going up all the time.”

She plays down the prominence of Bristol’s games sector but says there are encouraging signs. “Innovation capacity experts Nesta conducted research into the UK games industry landscape in 2014. Bristol was not listed as a games hub or cluster, but was identified as a potential growth area.”

Indie games studio Arcfire Games combines traditional artwork with video gaming to produce striking and unique video games. The company demonstrated their wares in November at the V&A museum as part of a virtual reality showcase. “We are currently working on Foramina – a pen and ink nightmare adventure game set in the dark and surreal world of Bristol-based artist Tom Mead,” says producer Owen Davies. “Like most indie start-ups, we balance our time between client work and the development of our own games.”

BOARD GAMES

Chance and Counters made a splash when it opened on Christmas Steps in 2016 and is now fully booked every weekend, hosting 1,500-2,500 gaming sessions a month.

Gamers at Chance and Counters

“Snakes & Lattes in Toronto is generally recognised as the first board game café; they opened back in 2010,” says founder Steve Cownie. “The concept landed in the UK around 2013 and there’s been a steady stream of openings since then – we were probably the fifth or sixth.”

With plans to expand into other premises, there doesn’t look to be signs of slowing. “Esdevium, the biggest UK distributor of board games, quotes a 25 per cent year-on-year growth in retail sales of tabletop games – that’s been consistent over the last four years.”

Not just showcasing them, Bristol is also creating games. Frank West of Park Street-based company City of Games ran a Kickstarter campaign to launch their first board game, The City of Kings, which raised £100,000 in three days. The fantasy adventure game is designed to bring video gamers to the table.

VIRTUAL REALITY

Virtual and augmented reality were identified by the annual Tech South West survey as the number one trend for 2017.

From their studio in the heart of Stokes Croft, Play Nicely create cross-platform games and experiences.  Established in 2009, they claim to have been at the forefront of emerging technologies such as VR, known for their pioneering game ‘Room 202’, which explores “natural navigation techniques such as nodding”.

Playing nicely

“VR has the potential to transport people into a space where you can completely shut them off from the real world,” says director Oliver Lindsey.

Meanwhile Opposable Games is one of the local industry’s strongest advocates and a founding member of the Bristol Games Hub. “Last month we hosted VR World Congress in the centre of Bristol,” says managing director Ben Trewhella. “It’s Europe’s largest VR conference which hosts hundreds of VR companies, where they show off their latest applications, games and experiences, and has grown 300 per cent since last year.”

The company has recently released a VR mobile game and toy for the Adventure Time cartoon and will be opening a VR lab in the centre of Bristol towards the end of the year. “Right now we’re moving from a company that develops applications and games for other clients, into one that exclusively works on our own projects,” Ben continues. “Over time we have found that we are very good at being on the bleeding edge of technology, inventing it if it doesn’t already exist, and also connecting a variety of people in specific areas of industry.”

And that, he believes, is true of the city as a whole: “Bristol has a far more emergent and experimental games sector compared to other cities in the UK and the rest of the world.