In our penultimate Hub Crawl, Ukie crossed the Irish Sea and headed to Belfast, parking up in the beautiful co-working space of Ormeau Baths. The video game hub of Belfast is one of strong community ties, evidence by the hugs and excited chatter as gaming professionals entered the lofty event space. It was lovely to hear how developers were using the Hub Crawl as a reason to get together after the previous 2 years of Covid and lockdowns.
Our first speaker came from our wonderful partners, Barclays, led by Gavin Smith. Gavin explained how Barclays can help games studios from a variety of angles. If you just need a business account, that is all good and they can help with that. However, if you need advice, opportunities for funding, access to investors – Barclays can help with that too. Gavin was keen to point our that as a bank, they endeavour to continue learning about the industry, which is why they have a dedicated gaming and Esports department to listen to, and be agile to the needs to the games industry in the UK.
Following on from Gavin was a fantastic reflective talk by Michael O’Kane from Level 91, developers of ‘Inertial Drift’. Michael discussed their learnings from idea to release, focusing on how processes had to be altered when developing for different consoles and potential issues with localisation. A key take away from this talk was don’t be afraid to rip things out aka be ruthless when figuring out what actually needs to be in your game. This can help to streamline processes, potentially cut costs and avoids overloading the team with more than what they have the capacity for.
Next up was Vicky Potts from Whitepot Studios - an alumnus of our Games Scale Up programme. Vicky presented a detailed talk about balancing client work with your own IP. Showing that a studio could do both, and can work to assist with financial sustainability of a studio. Vicky acknowledged that is a difficult balance, especially when success on the client side potentially means your own ideas need to be put to one side. However, it is certainly a business structure worth thinking about for a growing studio.
The next talk by Dr James Stafford of INCISIV hit home for many of us who spend too much time on TikTok as he explained the benefits of the platform to community building and marketing your game. James showed how it is easy to use the app to your advantage and tap into a wealth of potential players through spending just 10 mins a day creating content. As he admitted, INCISIV didn’t see much traction at first whilst James became familiar with the platform. However, through playing around and trying new things (hashtags,creating a content series, trending sounds, watching others content) people started to pick up on the goal keeping VR game – CleanSheet. Now, footballers, academies and thousands of players are aware of the game thanks to TikTok.
Our final presentation came from Lewis Silkin, a double team of Nick Allen and Rory Campbell discussing ‘Publishing agreements: key provisions and pitfalls’. When a lawyers have memes on their slides – you know it is going to be good! What could have been quite a difficult topic to understand, was made accessible and enjoyable by Nick and Rory with a key take away being that when negotiating with a publisher, the developers is often selling a licence not the product (unless a large sum is involved). Therefore, it is crucial to investigate the length of time such agreement is in place for, and do not always automatically grant rights for sequels (just provide the right of first refusal).
With that, Belfast was sadly over, yet the networking and chatter continued afterwards both in the venue and the street outside. A big thank you to Rory of Northern Ireland Screen who helped to arrange the hub crawl, Ormeau Baths for hosting and as always, Barclays for being our partner. Next stop, London! See you there!