The Industry

Part One:

• Do you think jobs in the games sector are increasing or decreasing?

Why?

In the UK in 2017, the games industry was valued at £5.11 billion, a 12% increase over 2016,
with the global industry being valued at somewhere around $99.6 billion in 2016, and in the
UK, in the last two years, there has been an increase of 0.46% more students taking degree
level games courses to then go on to work in the industry. Due to the sheer value and size of
the industry and the fact that globally, it’s gaining value faster than any other media industry
in the world, I can confidently say that the market and the number of jobs would be growing
to fill the workforce needed.

• Where are jobs concentrated geographically, in terms of the UK?

In the UK, the best places for employment, and those with the highest revenue, are Cardiff,
London and Birmingham, being listed as the 11th, 16th and 17th best cities worldwide for
attracting and retaining talented developers, with the majority (32%) being in the south East,
second highest majority (27%) being situated in London.

• What proportion of freelancers are there in this industry?

We actually have one of the lowest number of freelance developers in the UK, with only
around 14% of the industry population working freelance, with the other 86% on permanent
staff.

• From a personal perspective, are there any equality and diversity

challenges presented by this sub-sector?

The games industry does suffer at times with having poor equality and diversity groups,
with only about 19% of employees being female as opposed to the UK average of 45%, and
only 10% of employees in the UK are apart of a BAME group, both of whom are
underrepresented in development or creative/technical roles, mostly being more apart of the
legal and marketing teams overall.
Part Two:

1. We call on the Government to work with industry and allow flexibility within the
levy funds to develop standards that work for the industry.

By allowing more money to pass through the industry and to circulate between developers,
more teams can be better funded to allow higher quality, bigger projects, that then bolster
the industry through sales, but also allow for better training and employment opportunities.

2. Government should conduct a detailed skills review of the nation’s skills

needs at the beginning of each Parliament in order to help educational
institutions plan to meet the needs of employers and futureproof our economy.

By having a detailed, centralised measure of the skills and capabilities of the majority of the
developers in the nation, it can allow for better planned and specified training and teaching,
leading to better rounded dev teams with a higher quality mix of skills.

3. Government must prioritise working with the strategic sectors identified in the
Industrial Strategy to develop processing and eligibility criteria that keeps
pace with the rapidly evolving and specific skills needs of the creative tech
industries and ensures short-term skills gaps are plugged.

By helping to provide a support structure and recognising the developing field of hardware
and games for new systems such as AR or VR, the government can help the industry to
ensure that development for these sorts of systems remains at full capability and that we can
continue to lead the development and market in these fields.

4. We call on the Government to confirm that EU citizens working in the UK prior

to our departure from the EU in March 2019 will have the right to remain and
work in the UK as a matter of urgency.

As the UK is one of the largest destinations for high quality developers from other nations,
this would provide both an assurance of safety for EU nationals living and working in the
UK, and an assurance of safety to developers and teams that a large portion of their members
and employees will have a safe place in the UK, building reliability and permanent skills.

5. The Government must prioritise obtaining a data adequacy decision from the
EU as early as possible and, following our departure from the EU in 2019,
ensuring that the UK and European data protection regulators continue to
have a close and productive relationship.

Armed with the knowledge of how secure and formatted our data should be, developers and
publishers in the industry would be able to carry on securely trading and working together,
as well as continuing to have online servers and international accounts function as normal.

6. We call on the Government to ensure that our future trade agreements

enshrine existing trade liberalisations and avoid future regulatory divergences
that could hinder market access.
Currently, the international market is quite open and strong, but with the UK leaving the EU
a lot of trade agreements are in an unstable place or at risk; y having the governments
reassurance that the trade ways for games are open and free as they were before would put
the industry in a safe place without risk of being cut off from the rest of the world.

7. We call for a more coherent approach to export and inward investment

strategy from Government which empowers industry and sector experts to
maximise export value through a funded industry-led partnership.

What trades there are that we do have currently, need to be refined and defined further so
that better trade agreements can be reached, enabling better sales and income to the
industry.

8. We call on the Government to provide new funding as well as a clear remit to

public agencies to support the coordinated development of the games
industry.

By asking the government to provide funding and support to specific organisations and
groups, it can help the industry to better coordinate and supply itself, meaning it can grow
faster and easier, with more income to developers and more trade between other groups.

9. We call on the Government, alongside LEPs, Local Authorities and Combined

Authorities, to recognise the economic and cultural impact that the games
industry has around the UK by developing local plans for scaling-up existing
games and innovative interactive entertainment clusters.

The games industry is one of the most valued and fastest growing medias in the world, easily
double the value of the films industry, yet it’s still largely unrecognised by the wider
international market and government plans – having the recognition the industry needs and
deserves would allow them to make leaps and bounds in getting more funding and a larger,
more skilled workforce as it becomes a more mainstream career path.

10. We call on the Government to ensure that sufficient ambition for UK

connectivity is set with the broadband Universal Service Obligation (USO) in
the hundreds of megabits per second rather than the tens by 2025 – and that
the private sector is supported in achieving this ambition.

By having higher, basic national internet and broadband speeds, it would improve not just
the reliability of gaming online as a whole, but it would also improve the online games
market, allowing games bought and sold online to be downloaded and updated faster,
removing one of the main downfalls of the online market as a whole – long downtime during
instillation.
Part Three:

In the future, I would like to become an asset developer for a larger dev team, on weapons,
environments, etc., working from concept stage through to the actual designing and rigging
or the actual assets themselves. I would like to do this as I feel it’s the best place I could have
my ideas come to life, where I can really be creative.

As it stands, I still don’t know for sure whether or not I would rather go to University or take
on an apprenticeship, but as it stands, if possible, I would rather go to a University for a BA
and then try to get a job at a smaller developer for work experience before trying to move to a
larger team once I have to skills to qualify for the position.

One of the largest parts of a development team is the environment artists, likely due to the
scale of project they need to work on – because of this I assume it would be best to attempt to
gain skills in one of the smaller parts of the team, the more sought after positions with less
places, such as technical art or character design, which means I need to learn to do better
anatomical work or intricate design pieces, but first and foremost I need to improve to a
higher overall quality of work.

I would be happy to have any sort of work in the industry, but I would most like to have a
permanent position at a developer due to the assurance of job safety that it provides.

My dream goal is to be able to go and work for my favourite developer, Digital Extremes,
who are situated in Canada, Toronto. Before that though, I would have to move for first
University (assuming I get in) and then other work in the UK, likely to one of the big
developer hubs in the UK, such as Cardiff, Bristol or Birmingham.

My research has informed me about several details of my career plan that I hadn’t
considered or been aware of before, such as the split between different types of jobs in the
industry and where exactly different groups are concentrated in the UK, but for the most part
my plan has remained unchanged, I still hope to go to University for a BA, then to go and
work for a smaller developer, possibly while studying for a higher degree, to gain work
experience I can then use to try to get to a bigger developer.