Ask George, February 2025
Back answering your questions about the games biz
How do you get into games without moving to a big city
What does Europe need to do to stay competitive in games
What lesson should the games biz learn from film and TV
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Hello everyone,
Welcome back to the Ask George column. It’s the first time I’ve done one of these properly since last Autumn and it’s nice to be back answering your questions.
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Let’s get on with the first question.
How in the bloody hell does one break into the business without being in a big city!? - The Brothers Krynn.
Answer: with some difficulty.
Look, I know that the games industry’s success has been powered by its ability to create high value businesses in all corners of the world. Democratised development and distribution for the win.
BUT the truth is that geography matters when it comes to growing a games cluster. It is much easier to get a job in the games industry in a big city because they usually have all the major components a games cluster needs to grow (i.e. ‘skilled’ talent pumped out of universities, access to corporate services necessary to grow, presence of other games developers/publishers to evolve with, transport hubs).
So if you want to break into the business without being in a big city, you have a few major options.
Somewhat unhelpfully, the first tip is to aim for a smaller city or bigger town that happens to have a games cluster in place.
Looking at the UK because I know it best, you can avoid heading to London for a games industry job by targeting places like Guildford, Leamington Spa and Brighton.
They still have some of the big city problems (Brighton house prices = yikes) but they often have a bit more of a need for talent to relocate there to fill gaps that their local universities/populations can’t fill.
Beyond moving somewhere else, the only other real way that you can get in is by creating your own job or business in the place that you work.
This is a little trickier to do than it was in the pandemic years. The grim industry economic landscape, nervousness amongst developers and publishers to put cash into new businesses and companies increasingly mandating return to work closes options off significantly.
But if you do have a clear niche in your skillset that the industry can benefit from - let’s say, for sake of argument, fluency in a foreign language or complicated expertise in a field like technical art - you have more leverage to make your own thing, market it to industry and grow from there.
Lastly, the final tip is to gravitate towards the less ‘glamorous’ work that businesses are happy to dish out to companies working in other parts of the world.
I started my career in games by writing advertising copy for a mobile ads business based in Cambridge. It wasn’t a particularly glamorous gig by any stretch of the imagination. But starting there gave me an inroad into the industry, something that then - eventually - took me to a big city on my terms.
So yep, it’s not easy to break into games without gravitating towards a major hub. But if you’re willing to search for other smaller hubs, find a niche to call your own and take the roads less travelled to take your first step in games, you can succeed.
How can Europe maintain its competitiveness in the video games sector? - Bastien
This was one of the toughest questions I’ve been asked in recent weeks and months. And as with the poser above, the answer is with some difficulty.
On the one hand, Europe has a few big selling points as a games market and games cluster.
The Single Market has made it much easier to sell across the continent, the presence of a number of big video games markets gives businesses plenty of consumer value to tap into and the continent has a skilled workforce that is also comparatively cost-effective compared to talent Stateside.
On the other, the European industry has some major barriers to growth.
It lacks access to enormous pools of capital that can give games businesses lift-off, encouraging companies to sell-up or receive investment from elsewhere in a way that makes them bit part players in a wider supply chain.
The regulatory environment around Europe is well-intentioned regarding creating a level playing field, but it is looking increasingly cumbersome in a brutal political environment.
There’s also always some tension between individual nations and a wider ‘European’ market or identity that further complicates co-ordination.
Soooo how can Europe keep its competitiveness? One of the main things it needs to do is to define more closely what success looks like for the European games scene.
It is ok if the industry is not a powerhouse like the US or China if, for example, it prioritises the creation of a sustainable local video games industry to create high value jobs, generate tax returns and, perhaps, put more effort into driving forward the spillover effect of games into the European economy. But at the moment, I don’t think Europe knows what it wants to be - limiting its chances of getting to a meaningful outcome.
But even without a strategy, I think there are a few things Europe could do to remain competitive.
I think it needs to strike the right regulatory balance, using harmonisation as a vehicle to drive forward benefits for European businesses and consumers (e.g. USB-C in all devices, whoop!) rather than a weapon against Big Tech companies hiding behind Donald Trump.
It needs to encourage healthy competition between member states to create tax reliefs, incentives and funding pots to grow their domestic industries in rivalry with one another a la Australia’s states.
And I think there needs to be a concerted effort to look across existing European structures to find low lift ways to unlock growth in the industry, such as finding ways to use pots like Horizon Europe and the European Investment Fund to plough cash into the business.
None of this is easy to do. But if Europe can define what it believes its games industry should be for, it becomes a lot easier for it to find the right policies to maintain it in the future.
What do you think is the biggest lesson the games industry has yet to learn from other industries such as film and TV? - Harry
Oooft it’s a toughie because video games are SO MUCH BETTER THAN FILM AND TV YAH-BOOOOO-HISS.
Ok ok, intra-creative industries rivalries aside there is one thing that the games industry absolutely sucks at compared to film and TV: deploying its influence effectively.
With the greatest of respect and in the nicest way possible, the games industry is poor at pulling the levers of power.
It is too secretive to successfully tell its story. The sector’s leadership is too short-sighted and focused on short term commercial returns, leaving it little chance of shaping the long term agenda. It also continues to believe that it lacks cultural heft to shape the debate.
By comparison, the film and TV sectors have none of those hang ups.
The sector is constantly out there showing policy makers and press how its sausage is made to support its lobbying story. Film and TV execs know that a big chunk of the sector is supported by tax reliefs and public funding, which means they put in time to win hearts and minds. And you’ll always hear about - or see - powerful people schmoozing at a premiere for a big event.
So the biggest lesson I think the games industry can learn is to put a much more concerted effort into telling its wider corporate and political story to deliver meaningful wins for the industry.
And while I know that trade associations do this on behalf of the industry because I did it for the best part of half a decade, companies should do more.
If businesses put even a relatively small amount of funding into a savvy public affairs team, I’m confident that they could deliver significantly higher long term returns for their companies in the longer term: either by growing publicly available funding pots or protecting the industry more effectively from rules such as the European Commission’s potentially industry changing Digital Fairness Act.
But this requires a shift in mentality. And I think until executives fully understand and accept that the games industry has matured and must therefore find inventive ways to grow - including by playing the political game cleverly - film and TV will maintain its advantage in the policy space for years to come.