GUILDFORD FOCUS | BETA
THE CREATIVE GUILD
Some 30 miles from London, Guildford remains one of Europe’s leading games industry hubs. As a home to the likes of EA, Codemasters and Lionhead, it today rivals it metropolis neighbour. Will Freeman sat down with some of the town’s greatest development talent to find out why Guildford there is the option of ramping up and ramping down and using contractors because it is the kind of environment and area with enough critical mass of those staff that can support contract model. It’s great because it allows people to really specialise and move around. We’re certainly starting to see more of that here, but it would be great if there were more companies around the table with regard to contract staff. Wheaton: Even in the past few weeks I’ve noticed more dialogue and people talking about contractors. That’s really the first I’ve seen of anybody actively pushing that. Whyte: Yes. Hopefully we can all start to do that more and share. We’re all going to be growing and shrinking at different points as we make games, so the ability to foster an ecosystem where we can support people to move around between Guildford studios, and actually see them learn from different companies and spread that knowledge about making games between us; that could really help us all. Meade: You could say that the history of the Guildford hub is of a place that has sown the seeds of, well, a lot of things in the industry. I think the studios that exist here are just a little a cut above those in other areas. I’m sure everybody says that about their region, but I DEVELOP-ONLINE.NET
think the reason it’s true about Guildford is because there’s a lot of history here, and that’s an important factor.
The backdrop that Guildford has and the history it has as a hub means the studios that are here are of a pretty high quality. They’re thriving. Barry Meade, Fireproof A lot of the studios like Lionhead, like Media Molecule and like Codemasters employ people that have been part of the Guildford hub for 15 or 20 years, and that’s a huge factor. It ties in what we’re talking about here because, for example, when we set up Fireproof we saw that the games industry was going to move to a movie industry model, where instead of hiring outsources you’d be hiring really fucking good outsourcers who really know their stuff.
The backdrop that Guildford has and the history it has as a hub means the studios that are here are of a pretty high quality. They’re thriving, and they’re exactly the kind of studios that will allow that business model to thrive. It hasn’t happened completely yet, but with all the start-ups that are appearing here, give it a year or two and I think it will. Shields: One of the challenges we have come across at Turbulenz is that as we’re trying to combine the best bits of game platforms and the web, from a games developer point of view we’ve had no problem finding some of the best talent in the UK, but we also have to find talented web developers, and most of those seem to be migrating to East London. We haven’t so many around here. Things like David Cameron’s focus on East London make it tough.
Some of Guildford’s many senior development staff debate the pros and cons of the area
On the subject of staffing, doesn’t the number and quality of developers here make it fairly difficult in terms of competition for talent? Wheaton: We haven’t really had that problem, because Guildford is an attractive place to people all over the country. We’ve had staff join us from all over the place. And it helps that there’s a lot of companies here, so there’s always going to be work. JULY 2011 | 27