BETA | GUILDFORD FOCUS
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ow important is a sense of community to the Guildford game development hub? Harvey Wheaton, studio director, Supermassive Games: I think the Guildford development hub is highly sociable in an informal context. If you go out you’ll see lots of developers, everyone knows everyone and its absolutely fantastic. At a more formal level, it doesn’t really happen. Stuart Whyte, chief publishing officer, Lionhead Studios: But there is a lot of movement between the studios, and people changing careers within the hub, and there’s connections through that. Gavin Shields, COO, Turbulenz: We did have our first Tiga meet-up last week, and that was a really good opportunity for business discussions, because typically here, as has been said, it’s great if you can go to a pub, but on a business level there’s not so much here. I think it is important that we try and do more of that. Wheaton: It is quite hard to find the right vehicle for that though, isn’t it? We’ve been talking about it with Tiga and it is tricky to find the right vehicle for that kind of thing. We need to find a common purpose to provoke more than just going to a pub on a Friday or having a laugh at trade shows. Something needs to change there. 26 | JULY 2011
Is that because of the variety of studios in Guildford? You’ve got indies rubbing shoulders with giants like EA. Barry Meade, director, Fireproof Studios: That mix of large and small has actually been great for us. As a smaller studio, and one with a lot of freelancers, Guildford’s given us the opportunity to work with the likes of Codies and Media Molecule, and we’ve also worked with Sony and Activision. Shields: In that regard, for us it’s certainly a helpful thing to be here because locally we can be in touch with EA, Codemasters and many others, and that’s a result of us being here in Guildford and some of our guys working elsewhere here in the past. We’re actually more focused at the moment on the small and medium sized developers right now, and certainly the time is right to be in Guildford. It’s been a massive plus for us, because of the community of developers here. So there’s a degree of closeness between studios. How much does that help in terms of business development? Whyte: Lots of the teams in Guildford have bubbled off other studios in the areas. For example, Lionhead bubbled off Bullfrog, and Media Molecule bubbled of Lionhead. Loads of people have bubbled off EA and Criterion,
and it’s still going on today. I think that’s quite healthy, and it’s a really cool thing to happen, especially when – and I don’t know whether this is a bubble or not – the industry is supporting the idea of small teams doing iPhone-type experiences or Facebook games which require no much near as big an investment. It’s a good time for these bubbleoff studios to come into being. So Guildford’s game development ecosystem is well structured so as to adapt to a changing industry? Patrick O’Luanaigh, CEO, nDreams: That’s certainly the case in terms of being able to form links with other companies. Even for us, being based just outside Guildford, we’ve been able to work with all kinds of big companies like Codemasters. Other companies are not so far away like Double Six and Testology in Aldershot. So even though we might not see people socially all the time there’s such a good variety of different parts of the industry it’s really useful, which really helps with adapting. If you want to go and visit people and talk stuff over, being so close physically to so much variety is really handy. Whyte: One thing that’s really interesting in terms of the industry going forward is – and I know Lionhead really use this and I know EA use this – the use of contract staff. In