Tech Notes

May 17 2007 By Lewis Harrison, The Journal

Last week, I heard the head of a major investment firm tell the UK's young video games industry it was high time to grow up.

Hugh Mason, founding partner of creative industries investment company Pembridge Partners, opened last week's Northern Exposure 07 conference in York by warning that businesses that failed to take a more mature approach would be dead within a year or two.

I was at the conference expecting it to be overwhelmingly positive - it was all about exploring the unprecedented range of opportunities in front of today's UK game developers - so I found Mason's rather stark initial comments a little surprising at first.

But as he went on, it became clear his view was more positive than it first appeared, that his thoughts made sense. In one respect, you could say the games industry is actually very mature. We're talking about a multi-billion-pound industry here, one that last year brought more money into the UK than the film industry managed.

In most other respects, though, this is an industry still very much in its adolescence. Fast-paced changes in technology since the old 8-bit days of the 1980s, coupled with a rapidly growing and changing market demographic mean that many developers have never really been able to take stock and establish a profitable and sustainable business model.

Today though, there are plenty of opportunities to build such a thing, as the rest of the speakers at Northern Exposure 07 highlighted, if developers are prepared to take a mature and strategic approach to their business.

Casual games, in particular, emerged as perhaps the biggest opportunity for smaller developers to make a profit. These games - so called because they're simple, addictive, and easy to `casually' pick-up-and-play - have been growing in popularity over the past couple of years amongst games players of all ages.

Lou Fawcett of Eidos, the company behind Lara Croft and Tomb Raider, and George Bray of leading US publisher MumboJumbo, both reckoned casual games are a relatively untapped and potentially highly lucrative new market for developers.

Other areas of emerging opportunities highlighted included in-game advertising, digital distribution and cutting out the middleman by selling directly to consumers.

North-East England is home to a large games development community, with around 10% of the industry's workforce based here - from graduate start-ups such as Lo-Jen and Halch, to "super studios" such as Eutechnyx.

I was glad to see representatives from many of these businesses at the event.

As with any adolescent, there are some big choices ahead for this growing industry.

But as Mason put it, there are "good times ahead" for game developers willing to adapt.

• Lewis Harrison is communications manager at Codeworks GameHorizon, the business network for the North-East's games industry.