This article was taken from the November 2014 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Something strange has happened to the UK's games industry Although there have been several closures of large studios in recent years -- Blitz, SCE Studio Liverpool and Eurocom folded in 2012, and Black Rock Studios in 2011 -- employment in the sector rose by over seven per cent. The reason: a wave of small studios rising from the ashes. "These closures have seen developers saying, 'Right, we're going to do this ourselves and make the games we always wanted to make'," says Dan Pinchbeck, cofounder of studio The Chinese Room. Mobile gaming and the ease of uploading a title to the App Store opened the floodgates, but digital distribution is allowing new companies to carve out a chunk of the desktop and console market too. "Saying you were going to start a games company used to be like saying you were going to set up a movie studio with your mates," says Paul Gouge, founder and CEO of Playdemic. "The cost of development was incredibly high, and you needed a relationship with a publisher to get into stores."
Although the hurdles of bringing a game to market may be lower, creating a hit is as challenging as ever -- here's increased competition. "It's less monolithic and there's greater choice than before. You're no longer pushing a very wide audience into a small range of games," Gouge says. "It's scary, it's unstable, but it's more exciting as a result."
PLAYDEMIC, The Mass Entertainers
As a former investment banker, Paul Gouge, founder and CEO of Wilmslow-based Playdemic, understands the business potential of mobile gaming. "Games are the killer app," he says. "Eighty per cent of the revenue behind the app stores is from games and the initial risk is much less than for console. I'm not about to invest £300 million and five years in a single product." Despite having less than a year spent on its initial development, Playdemic's Village Life has been played by more than 19 million people since 2012. The company's most recent project, Gang Nations (see opening spread) launched on mobile in September and is designed to appeal to a similarly broad audience. "Games are often seen as a niche enterprise, but they shouldn't be.
Humans are fundamentally playful animals," Gouge says. "Via Facebook and mobile we entertain close to a million people a day.
That's a wonderful thing to be able to say that you do."
THE CHINESE ROOM, The Storytellers
Critically acclaimed and controversial, The Chinese Room's first release had traditionalists questioning what actually counted as a game. Set on a deserted island, the richly atmospheric Dear Esther strips away the autonomy gamers are used to as it takes them on a scripted journey through the mind of a grieving husband. "Like anything new, it was threatening at the time," says director and composer Jessica Curry. "But narrative-driven games are starting to become accepted in the industry." The Brighton studio's current project, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, which will be released on PS4 in 2015, keeps the dark themes and haunting soundtrack, but gives players more freedom to explore - until the apocalypse hits. "The games industry is very good at fun and very good at excitement," says Curry. "But when it comes to dramatic stories, tragic stories, meaningful stories, it's still got a lot to learn."
OPPOSABLE GAMES, The Multiscreen Champions
If there's a new games technology trend -- whether multiscreen or virtual reality -- you can bet that Bristol-based developers Opposable Games are on board. After three years working for clients including Channel 4 and the Wellcome Trust, the studio is now building its first major solo project using procedural generation, whereby a landscape, level or environment is generated randomly by the computer every time a player encounters it, ensuring that no two play sessions are ever the same. Set in a sci-fi universe, the PC-based Salvaged has won awards for its dual-screen gameplay in which players use a tablet as a controller, powered by One Touch Connect, Opposable's proprietary connectivity software. "There are more and more devices out there and it's such a waste to have people play one sort of game on a PC and not be able to translate that on to mobile," says CEO and cofounder Ben Trewhella. "Multiscreen's time has finally come."
MIDOKI, The Visual Experimenters
With 15 years in the industry, including stints at Sony and Codemasters, Midoki cofounders Jonathan Webb and Daniel Martinez Normand have seen their share of big studios. "Moving from a large team working on console to a room with seven guys makes a massive difference," says Martinez Normand. "The quest for realism you see in console games is so expensive, but when you have small teams with limited budgets, you have to be clever. Mobile has brought about an explosion of visual styles."
This was demonstrated in the playful graphics of Plunder Pirates, its latest title. Webb says that digital distribution allows studios such as Midoki to experiment with new business models. "It used to be that you'd release your game and that was it," he says. "Now that's just the beginning. Even before Plunder Pirates' release we were planning the features we could add with future updates."
WHITE PAPER GAMES, The PC Enthusiasts
In 2011, as developers flooded the App Store to grab a chunk of the mobile gaming gold rush, White Paper Games decided to buck the trend. "With PCs, if a game is interesting it will eventually get the exposure," says cofounder Pete Bottomley. "It's not a one-hit thing like mobile where you have a small window to get into the top ten." The Manchester studio's first game, Ether One, comes with Oculus Rift support and casts players as "The Restorer", tasked with entering and repairing the mind of an Alzheimer's patient. It was one of the first titles to go through digital distribution platform Steam's Greenlight programme, which allows the player community to vote on in-development games, the most popular receiving support to publish. "It gave us exposure to a massive audience," Bottomley explains. "There'd be no way the independent games scene would be anything like as big without these platforms."
NDEMIC CREATIONS, The Viral Strategists
James Vaughan, founder and CEO of Ndemic Creations, never expected his first game to go global. "I worked on it in my spare time - it cost about £2,500," he says. "My idea of success was making that back." Vaughan achieved this just hours after launch. Three days later Plague Inc., a mobile strategy game about evolving a disease, became the number-one paid game in the UK. It's since topped charts in ten regional App Stores and has more than 35 million players. "You hear of developers who go crazy and hire 500 people," he says. "Their costs go through the roof but they can't replicate their success." London-based Ndemic has expanded to six employees, who are working to bring Plague Inc. to desktop and Xbox One.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
