UK Video Games Industry

The UK video games industry is the largest in Europe and the UK is a world class location for video game development. The UK boasts a substantial and highly qualified talent pool, some of the finest video games studios globally, technical as well as creative excellence, an ongoing ability to generate products that sell well globally and to create original video games IP. The UK is home to the studios that have developed video games such as Grand Theft Auto IV (the fastest selling entertainment product of all time), Runescape, the Fable series, Broken Sword and LittleBigPlanet.

The video game sector offers opportunities for growth and high value, high technology job creation for the UK. Estimates from PWC suggest that the global market for video games will grow from $52.5 billion in 2009 to $86.8 billion in 2014. TIGA’s ambition is to make the UK the best place in the world to do games business and so enable the UK games industry and the UK economy to secure a growing share of this huge market.

The UK games development sector contributes approximately £1 billion to UK Gross Domestic Product  per annum.

The UK games industry employs over 9,000 highly skilled development staff, 80 per cent of whom are employed outside of London. 80 per cent of the workforce in game studios such as Climax, Jagex, Kuju Entertainment, Rebellion and Ubisoft Reflections are qualified to degree level or above.  

The UK game development sector is R&D intensive. Two fifths of UK game developers have a budget dedicated to R&D. UK game developers spend on average 20 per cent of turnover on R&D.  

UK game developers are export focused. 95 per cent of UK game businesses export at least some of their games/services to overseas markets. 

The video games sector is also low carbon in output. Most of the work in games development involves design on computers, the packaging in games is minimal and box products are relatively light to manufacture and to transport. In the future, video games will become even more low carbon in nature as the industry moves towards digital distribution.