BAFTA’s games community: Video Games Industry Memo, 07/03/2024
Going for video game gold (face statues)
This week’s Video Games Industry Memo is supported by Just About
BAFTA’s Head of Games chats about the growth of their games community
Apple terminates Epic’s developer account in alternative app store battle
WWE 2K24 wrestles to the top of this week’s releases
It was my birthday yesterday and I received a wonderful present that I am very happy to be sharing with you all: the first ever sponsorship of VGIM.
The lovely team at Just About kindly signed on the dotted line as the first advertiser within these hallowed virtual pages - nabbing them the chance to show off to nearly 1300 people shaping the UK and global video games industry.
This prompts a few questions. What does this mean for the long term future of VGIM? Can I sponsor the newsletter too? And were your birthday presents really so underwhelming that someone buying advertising off was your favourite gift?
The answers are mercifully simple. VGIM is becoming a larger part of my future and I look forward to sharing more soon. You can snap up a sponsorship by emailing videogamesindustrymemo@substack.com. And yes, it wasn’t my best year for presents and no I don’t want to talk about it *sobs*.
Anyway, let’s turn away from the recriminations over who did or didn’t buy me something for my birthday and turn our energy towards something much more interesting: a big chat with BAFTA.
The big read - BAFTA’s games community
Today is a big day for those of us who enjoy watching people triumphantly hold golden headed statues aloft.
The shortlist for this year’s BAFTA Games Awards is being announced at 2pm UK time, with host Lucy James leading a lovely conversation about the nominees in a livestream hosted on the charity’s social media channels.
It’s, as always, an important moment for the sector. Over the past two decades, the BAFTAs have become both a regular fixture within the global games calendar and, almost certainly, its most credible awards show.
Beyond playing a crucial role in teaching an entire generation of game developers what black tie dress code actually means (no, a plain black regular tie doesn’t count), BAFTA’s decision to celebrate the craft and creativity of games has gifted the medium some important validation - helping it make inroads into the wider cultural conversation.
Yet despite this, the relationship between BAFTA and games has historically felt standoff-ish.
Our sector’s suspicion of “outsiders”, combined with the reasonable sense that BAFTA has always felt more comfortable within its film and TV heartlands, turned what should have been a natural convergence of interests into an awkward and uneasy partnership.
So in an effort to close the gap, BAFTA appointed Luke Hebblethwaite to drive forward its video games agenda.
Luke was appointed Head of Games in December 2021, joining the organisation following a lengthy and impactful stint as Ukie’s Insight and Innovation Manager with the brief to bring the charity closer to the industry.
But how has that gone so far? I caught up with Luke ahead of the announcement of the shortlist to find out.
A head of the games
Despite becoming BAFTA’s first Head of Games, it’s important to emphasise here that Luke is not the first person to work at BAFTA in an industry specific role.
During my time in the industry, BAFTA’s games offer has been supported by a range of great people such as Mel Phillips, Sam D’Elia and Lewis Peet - the latter who remains in post as the charity’s Games & Childrens Officer - who have all played a part in building its relationship with the industry.
However, BAFTA’s commitment to games often felt theoretical rather than actual. From the outside, it felt like dedicated staff members within the games team were fighting a rearguard action to ensure its programme was properly supported by the wider organisation.
Luke’s appointment in December 2021 wasn’t just an effort to provide BAFTA with a figurehead for its games programme. It also marked an important strategic shift in the way the charity approached the medium.
“BAFTA had just had a large review around its 75th anniversary at which it was decided that, having done games for nearly 20 years, the board wanted to double down,” Luke said. “They saw the potential of the medium and wanted to grow, expand and evolve our work to meet an ever growing and evolving games industry.”
The ambition was expansive, but it was also well timed. Luke joined BAFTA just as the Covid-19 pandemic began to wane and shortly prior to the appointment of its new CEO - former Sky Studios exec Jane Millichip - in July 2022.
This meant it was an opportune time for Luke to pitch BAFTA a fresh perspective on its games programme, using the momentum generated during the pandemic and a change at the top of the organisation to make the case for a shift in approach.
“I joined at a time when a lot of the work we were doing in games needed revitalising,” he said.
“I think a lot of my job was internal to BAFTA and being an advocate for change within the organisation. It was about talking about how things work in games, convincing people internally about the strategies we thought would work with the kinds of activities that we could undertake and find out where we could get support from various entities within the industry - either in terms of our activities or in financial terms.”
And the result of some much needed internal thinking about video games - and, let’s be honest, some polite but firm prodding about their significance - has resulted in some subtle but impactful shifts to the games programme that is making it much more industry friendly.
Getting the Longlist of it
The first way this subtle shift in approach has manifested itself is within the Games Awards itself.
In particular, the decision to publish the full longlist of nominees for the video games awards in December 2023 - the first time BAFTA has ever done this - has proven to be surprisingly valuable for a number of reasons.
On the surface, the main reason it is important is that publishing the longlist is an act of parity that puts the games awards on the same footing as BAFTA’s film and TV counterparts.
However, the publication of the longlist at the end of the calendar year has had three specific benefits for games that shows BAFTA is getting better at grasping the needs of industry.
First, publishing the longlist effectively demonstrates the breadth of the medium at large.
While BAFTA could not list all 257 games that were entered into the process, publishing the longlist means that - in Luke’s words - the public saw a “quite diverse spread” of video games: a useful challenge to the idea that the medium is only defined by its middlebrow blockbusters.
Second, announcing the longlist before Christmas provided the medium with something that it is always seeking - a sprinkling of gold dust to help video games sell during a key buying period.
“We actually did some work with YouGov very recently where we surveyed over 2,000 British consumers of all age groups and demographics. And we saw that in 18 to 34 year olds, 34% said that BAFTA selecting a game of the year would encourage them to to play or buy those games.”
By launching the longlist in time for Christmas, and deliberately describing the games featured within as 2023’s defining titles, the charity was able to provide useful validation to a significant range of games: giving them a welcome boost and providing a useful reminder of the charity’s wider value.
Third and finally, publishing the longlist early also helped with the judging of the awards themselves by giving BAFTA jurors more time to play games.
Unlike the film or TV awards, where a juror may reasonably be able to churn through all the content they need to assess within a couple of weeks, it is implausible for a video games judge to play the games they’re assessing in full.
The Best Game longlist for 2023, for example, features epic adventure games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Each has an average play time that stretches well beyond the time spent watching ten films, making it challenging to complete one major title - let alone them all.
As a result, judges aren’t expected to play every game in full. They are, however, expected to get a reasonable handle on each longlisted prospect. This means they need as much time as possible to work through the list to arrive at a fair outcome: something that Luke recognises.
“We wanted to make sure that our voting members had more time to play those games. Through a lot of internal work, we’ve moved the timelines of our awards a lot earlier in the year so the games get out into the hands of our voting members earlier…giving everyone more time to explore all of those games as much as possible, ” Luke explained.
This approach doesn’t resolve all of the possible imperfections with the judging process. It’s why BAFTA puts in place a range of other measures, including a carefully structured multi-tier judging process and a tastily strict approach to auditing the awards in partnership with Deloitte, to ensure a credible outcome.
Nevertheless, the publication of the longlist, and the wider behind the scenes changes to the judging horizon, demonstrates a better understanding of the unique requirements of the medium.
And a big reason why BAFTA is demonstrating that understanding is a result of the second subtle shift that has taken place within its walls over the past two years: its concerted effort to better support its games community.
Community awareness
One of Luke’s major objectives in his role as Head of Games has been to make the video games community feel at home within BAFTA. And achieving that means literally making them feel at home within the organisation’s swanky Central London HQ.
“In the past, people from the games industries coming to our headquarters in the BAFTA building on Piccadilly maybe felt like it was a film and TV space and it wasn't necessarily for them. So one of the first things we wanted to do was break down that barrier further.”
The organisation has sought to do this in three ways. First, the creation of a new membership tier from BAFTA called Connect, which has brought developing creative talent from across film, TV and games into the fold for the first time, has proven particularly important for growing its games community.
As we know from Luke’s previous work at Ukie on the UK games industry census, nearly two thirds of the sector’s workforce is under the age of 35.
Introducing a membership tier that inevitably brings younger people into the fold has helped BAFTA organically align to the sector more effectively, injecting its community with a greater number of industry members.
Second, BAFTA has sought to make the space more welcoming to games members to ensure they feel it is a space they can occupy.
As an example of this, the games team introduced a simple ‘First Friday’ networking initiative for its members to encourage them to socialise together once a month.
This quickly evolved from a quiet friendly drink to a buzzy networking night - drawing hundreds of people through its doors every month and deepening the charity’s connection to industry.
Finally, BAFTA has evolved its games events programme to align effectively with the shared priorities of its individual members. This enables it to celebrate the craft of games and constructively address issues of concern to people in the sector.
The recent wave of industry redundancies offer a prime example of this. BAFTA games members have been affected by the widespread cuts to industry headcount, including members of the organisation’s industry led steering committee.
To address concerns in a constructive wave, a recent BAFTA Connect conference aimed at the games industry - which was curated by Grace Shin, another Ukie alumni who has made the move over to the organisation - featured a panel about “career sustainability” that sought to provide guidance to members how to keep pushing forward with an industry career even when times are tough.
“We recognise that many of our members have been affected personally by the redundancies in the industry and this is very much in our minds across all of the work that we are shaping at the moment,” Luke said.
And while the Connect panel isn’t the only example of how the games programme has more effectively aligned towards the breadth of priorities within the games industry - ranging from inspirational game design talks about Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth to its Games Mental Health Summit in partnership with Safe in our World - it appears that BAFTA’s listening exercise isn’t just building a healthy community; it’s beginning to build trust too.
Beyond the borders
So how does BAFTA plan to support the video games industry further? I asked Luke about whether it had any plans for the year ahead and he understandably kept schtum, given our proximity to the necessarily secretive awards.
However, Luke did express his hope that BAFTA could continue to achieve its half of the deal with industry by helping it to overcome cultural prejudices that may still be capping the true value of the sector to wider society.
“Video games remain estranged from higher culture, and I think we all recognise that,” Luke explained. “But you know there was once a time when that was true of film and TV. And, funnily enough, BAFTA was here to be a leader in the evolution of opinion about those mediums.”
“It was founded against this backdrop of the imposition of a huge value added tax burden on US Films in the 1940s, which caused a lot of problems for UK companies. There’s always a business driver in all of these things and ‘culture’ is a critically important part of how a lot of games businesses are supported.”
Now, this isn’t to say that BAFTA is about to turn into a lobbying machine on behalf of the games industry. Luke was keen to stress it is not a trade association (probably to prevent us both from having flashbacks to some occasionally interesting times together) and that its mission is anchored to the needs of its individual members.
But he is also right about the opportunity that BAFTA could present to the games industry, especially within the UK.
With the sector needing to defend key sources of ‘cultural’ funding during a time of Government belt tightening, building a mutual partnership with organisations like BAFTA that goes beyond awarding, erm, awards is crucial for establishing long-lasting credibility.
And as I know from my dalliances with the stakeholders who sit at the heart of media, policy and politics, what starts off as soft power has a tendency to harden into influence over time.
There’s more work for BAFTA to do to fully convince a skittish and wary industry that the changes to its games programme will hold their power over time.
But if it can demonstrate that these changes are here to stay, then we may find that an occasionally awkward partnership between games and one of the world’s biggest cultural names may begin to blossom in the years to come.
News in brief
App Store-ing up trouble: Epic Games has had its App Store account terminated by Apple, putting its plans to release an alternative mobile store on ice. The news, which was broken by Epic via a statement on its website, called Apple’s decision ‘a serious violation’ of the EU’s new Digital Markets Act (DMA) and comes just days after Margrethe Vestager, the bloc’s competition chief, said that app store compliance would be top of the EU’s DMA to do list. Now let’s all gather in a circle and start chanting, everybody: fight, fight, fight, fight!
Nintendon’t mess with them: Tropic Haze, the developers of Switch emulator Yuzu and its 3DS counterpart Cintra, is shutting down after being sued by Nintendo for ‘facilitating piracy at a colossal scale’. The company also agreed to pay the Big N $2.4m in damages, reinforcing Nintendo’s reputation as the Anton Chigurh of IP rights enforcement.
Joga Bonito: The Brazilian games industry grew by 3.2% to reach a value of $251.6m in 2023, according to the boffins at Abra Games and Apex Brazil. There are plenty of interesting nuggets in there but the ones that stand out include a) the size of Brazil’s PC market and b) the fact that the industry’s headcount actually grew in 2023 (shocking, I know).
A total Hunt: The UK Government’s Spring Budget was a washout for the games industry. While the creative industries as a whole received a billion quid for new or extended tax reliefs aimed at *inhales* film studios, independent films, visual effects, theatres, orchestras, museums and galleries, video games didn’t even receive a mention this time round. Ukie, predictably, was unimpressed.
Negative press: 56% of consumer games journalists feel ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ negative about the future of games journalism, according to a new survey from Big Games Machine. And if that wasn’t cheery enough, 63% of the 150+ sample believe AI will have a negative impact on their field and 47% report that their workload is up ‘significantly’ or ‘slightly’ in 12 months. Now if only there was some way to help fund great video games writing…
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On the move
Remco Verheij has money on his mind as Newzoo’s new Chief Financial Officer…Allison McDuffee is Roblox’s new Global Head of Brand Insights after a stint at Twitch…Mark Pawluk has been promoted to Senior Influencer & Creator Specialist for Call of Duty (EMEA) at Activision…Wayne Emanuel has also received a bump in title becoming Gaming Creators Lead at TikTok…Molly Shepherd-Boden has been appointed Senior Recruiter at Escape Velocity Entertainment…Benjamin Seignovert has ended an excellent six year stint at Video Games Europe to become Nintendo’s new Product Regulatory Compliance Advisor...and Luc Delany is now the Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at newly announced games-focused age assurance tech biz k-ID.
Jobs, jobs, jobs
The Department of Culture, Media and Sport is hiring a Lead Policy Analyst, Gaming to keep sawing through the loot box shaped Gordian Knot its tied for itself…EA Sports is looking for an Integrated Communications Specialist in the Hollywood of Games (aka Guildford)...Ubisoft Reflections is seeking a Brand Realisation Lead for a new IP…There’s a Narrative Script Editor role available at The Games Workshop in Nottingham…And leading virtual train flogger Dovetail Games is hiring an Art Producer to create realistic worlds across its games…
Events and conferences
Pocket Gamer Connects, San Francisco - 18th-19th March
Game Developers Conference, San Francisco - 18th-22nd March
Mobile Games Intelligence Conference, London - 27th March
London Games Festival, London - 9th-25th April
London Developer Conference, London - 11th April
BAFTA Games Awards, London - 11th April
Games of the week
WWE 2K24 - Enjoy the latest entry in 2K’s annual WWE franchise which comes with not one, not two but three different box covers.
The Outlast Trials - Look, it’s well-reviewed and very popular so I have to mention it here but I’m definitely not playing a multiplayer survival horror game, however much you pay me.
Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley - Delight in a story-rich musical adventure based on my third favourite thing to have come out of Finland.
Before you go…
Think you’ve had enough content about the disastrous Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow? Think again.
Kotaku has a round up of all the efforts to recreate its peculiar brand of ‘causing children to cry’ magic in games such as Fortnite, The Sims and Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Come with me, and you’ll be, in a world of parodic recreations…