Ukie travelled north of the border and across the Tay Bridge this week as the Hub Crawl landed in the birthplace of Scottish game development – Dundee! The city is home to over 40 studios with Abertay University renowned for being the first to introduce a dedicated game design course in 1997. To this day, Dundee attracts hundreds of aspiring game developers as they arrive in the city to learn, sometimes staying in the area to set up their own studio or join an established Dundee-based company. Where better then to discuss the topic of ‘Next Level Indie’?
Huddled in Beat Generator Live, a quirky live music venue, we were first introduced to Barclays Gaming and Esports division by Gavin Smith and David Gowens. As they both explained, their role in Barclays is to help developers achieve personal goals, a role they both take great pride in. As David suggested, “The video game industry eats challenges for breakfast”, praising the tenacity and creative power seen in contemporary game development.
Tristan Greaves from AWS was the next up on stage, introducing the audience to the world of cloud service including some of the more unconventional usages such as cheat detection, text to speech and further integration of AI for analytics.
Next up was Aaron Ludlow from Interact by Playstack who mapped the history of branding within games and explained how brands are increasingly looking for opportunities to work with game developers. With integrated advertising in mobile games a key method for collaboration.
Finally, we had Brian Baglow, Founder and Director of The Scottish Game Network, who took those in attendance on a whirlwind tour of game development past, present and future in Scotland. Pride shone through again, as Brian reflected on gaming as a hobby being seemingly recession proof and also pandemic proof. “These gamers”, he continued, “haven’t gone away; they have stuck around. It doesn’t matter if they play Wordle or Minecraft – they are ours”.
The evening cumulated in a panel of Paul Farley (Firestoke Games), Danny Parker (Ninja Kiwi) and Brian Baglow (SGN). A key take away from this centred around defining what ‘success’ is, as to grow means knowing what success is for you as a studio. It may be to gain revenue to enable hiring more staff, it may be continuing to provide remote working options or it could simply be to finish a game. Success is multifaceted, therefore the concept of growth is too.
A big thank you to everyone who joined us in Dundee, next week Ukie is heading to Liverpool – see you there!