The Ukie team’s mission is to make the UK the best place to make, play and sell games across the world. But how exactly have we tried to achieve that over the past twelve months on behalf of the sector? Join us for a brief look back at everything we got up to this year.
January
January is a month of new beginnings, looking forward and planning ahead – and so its fitting that 2022 began with a series of events concerned with the direction of the games industry on both a micro and macro level.
As the spectre of Omicron loomed large over the country, the hybrid nature of the Hub Crawl series was clustered together – with virtual sessions taking place in the winter months and in-person sessions planned for the spring and summer when infections tend to lower. The theme this year was “Next Level Indies, focusing on giving advice to burgeoning indie developers – and kicked off successfully with the first two events focused on hiring: Games staff of the future and Retaining staff long term, discussing how to find and importantly keep the much-needed talent that fuels our industry.
In the meantime, Digital Schoolhouse continued its work fostering this talent long term with a £75,000 grant from Arts Council England to run a pilot programme in public libraries, enabling local communities to benefit from its wide range of play-based learning activities that also address the four Universal Library Offers. The programme has now successfully rolled out across five areas in the UK.
January also saw the launch of the Playable Futures article series. A collaboration between Ukie, GamesIndustry.biz and Diva Agency, the first article with Sir Ian Livingstone – renowned co-founder of Games Workshop – was published alongside an article with senior Vice President of Tencent, Steven Ma. Pitched as a series of insights, interviews and articles from global games leaders sharing their vision of the games industry in 2022 and beyond, the series was designed to encourage thought and discussion about past and future trends that will come to shape our sector.
February
Valentines Day came early for the games industry as on the 1st February then-Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries announced £8 million of Government investment to the UK Games Fund, after Ukie advocated extensively for its increase.
A few days later, we released “Organising Inclusive Informal Events in the Games Industry” by Dr Anna Ozimek and Carolina Rueda, alongside its best practice guide in collaboration. The report was a collaboration between Ukie, University of York and Women in Games, recommending developing codes of conduct for events, running events at different times of the day or week and improving accessibility through live streaming.
This month’s virtual Hub Crawl events focused on technologies and funding, with sessions on New technology for games, Finance for growth, Blockchain/NFT and Building a relationship with consumers. And the series was inevitably improved by the appearance of our new Membership Officer, Dr Helen Johnson who joined us this month fresh from her PhD on the occupational community of game developers.
March
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March saw the launch of the second UK Games Industry Census report – the largest ever survey investigating the demographics and working practices of the UK games industry. Completed by over 3600 industry workers in Autumn 2021, it asked respondents about their personal characteristics and background – such as ethnicity, gender identity and sexuality – as well as about how they work and their attitudes towards their workplace and industry.
Key takeaways included finding that 52% of workers preferred a hybrid approach to remote/in person working, 18% report having at least one neurodevelopmental condition such as autistic of ADHD, and 24% of workers identify as a sexuality other than heterosexual (up from 21% in the previous census, with both numbers significantly higher than in the wider adult population).
Earlier in the month, EA announced a partnership with Digital Schoolhouse to improve school students’ engagement with computer science and inspire the next generation to pursue a career in STEAM. Primary school students at the 52 DSH schools received resources around the game Knockout City to explore AI through online and offline activities.
The partnership culminated in the inaugural Festival of Play later in the year. (See below)
The month of International Women's Day also saw our Head of Education and Director of Digital Schoolhouse Shahneila Saeed scoop up the award for Educational Impact at the MCV/Develop Women In Games Awards. Ukie also celebrated IWD with an "Ask Us Anything" panel curated by #RaiseTheGame and featuring a host of women in games - including our very own Grace Shin.
April
And from one piece of landmark data to another, as April saw the release of Ukie’s annual consumer games market valuation, showing that the UK spent a record-breaking £7.1bn in total on games software, hardware and culture in 2021. Hardware sales drove most of this growth, with consoles up +32.9% (£1.13bn) and VR hardware up 41.9% (£183m) – in contrast, spending on digital console and mobile software stabilised (£1.65bn and £1.46bn respectively).
Later in the month London Games Festival continued to celebrate and support the capital’s thriving games scene, announcing the Ensemble 2022 cohort, hosting the Now Play This Festival, seeing seven Ukie members win at the BAFTA Games Awards (which Team Ukie got to attend!) and more.
This month Ukie won the Gayming Magazine LGBTQ+ Industry Diversity award for the #RaiseTheGame pledge, and our very own Dominic Shaw attended the ceremony to pick up the trophy!
We were also thrilled to welcome some new additions to our team: Sian Mayhall-Purvis joined the Ukie/Digital Schoolhouse team as Education Programme Co-Ordinator and Mark Ward joined as Community Outreach officer at Digital Schoolhouse.
May
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As the weather warmed and infection rates lowered, the in-person Hub Crawl sessions kicked off in May, beginning at Guildford Pavilion and moving to Beat Generator Live in Dundee. Also centred around “Next Level Indies”, the series brought together developers from the region to learn from each other and network.
The Guildford event saw talks from Matt Murphy of Genba Digital, Nick Ferguson from Microsoft, and Gareth Hill from BDO, finishing off with a panel discussion in which Kostas Zarifis and James Brooksby discussed growth through tales of success and failure. Meanwhile the Dundee event welcomed Tristan Graves from AWS, Aaron Ludlow from Interact by Playstack, Brian Baglow of the Scottish Game Network, and a panel discussion with Brian, Danny Parker of Ninja Kiwi, and Paul Farley of Firestoke Games.
Finally, May saw #RaiseTheGame co-host with Take Two a fantastic initiative by the She Plays Games podcast and the Limit Break mentorship programme for underrepresented game developers to get their headshots taken by a professional photographer.
June
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After a fairly quiet May, June was jam-packed. The month began as the All-Party Political Group for video games and esports held its first in-person Annual General Meeting for 2022 since the Covid-19 lockdowns, with Ukie providing a “state of play” of the UK games industry following AGM proceedings. These provided an overview of the latest reports and statistics about the sector, including the UK Consumer Valuation Report, The British Film Institute’s Screen Business report, and Ofcom’s Online Nation report. And just in time too, as this month saw us welcome our new Head of Policy and Public Affairs, Dominic Murphy.
June also saw Ukie and Creative Enterprise open applications for the popular Games Scale Up programme. Now in its third year, the accelerator began in September and welcomed in games developers, publishers or support services to learn the vital skills required to grow their businesses. New for 2022 were the “Foundations” programmes with two tracks - Foundations for Game Studios and Foundations for Creative Tech & Services. A slightly shorter course (three months instead of six) the two programmes provided the insights, network and resources needed to grow a sustainable business for a cohort of earlier stage Games studios and tech & service companies adjacent to the games sector.
Meanwhile, the Ukie Hub Crawl stopped off in Liverpool, Bristol and Belfast. The Liverpool event, hosted at Barclays Eagle Labs, featured Bartek Zakrzewski from Monteith International, Gareth Williams from Press Engine and Thomas Bidaux from ICO Partners. Meanwhile, the panel discussion for this event was made up of David Harper (Skyhook), Alison Lacy (Avalanche Studios Group), and Niall Taylor (Draw & Code).
Hosted at Co-Op Mode, the Bristol event welcomed Phil Wildman from GG Insurance and Julia Morrish from Creative UK, Jermaine Odelli from Fourth Floorand a broad panel discussion featuring Natalie Mikkelson from Lo-Fi Games, Joshua Baldwin from Aardman Animations and Philip Oliver from Panivox. Finally, Belfast’s Ormeau Baths played host to Michael O’Kane from Level 91, Vicky Potts from Whitepot Studios (an alumnus of our Games Scale Up programme), Dr James Stafford of INCISIV and a final presentation from Lewis Silkin, a double team of Nick Allen and Rory Campbell.
Take a look at our July-December round up here.