Mapping Scotland’s Videogames Industry
How many game developers are there in Scotland?
Serious question. Right now, how many studios and games creators do we have? 10? 50? 100? 250?
According to the last official research from UKIE, as well as SGN company directory, we had around 115 studios creating games, making it the fourth largest cluster in the UK. However, that data is from 2016. In a sector which evolves as rapidly as videogames, how accurate is that five years down the line?
As lockdown kicked in, I started to take a look at the videogames sector in Scotland and what I found was a little worrying. We don’t know. We don’t know how many developers are out there. We don’t know how many freelancers work in or support the games sector. We don’t know how many non-game-developing companies are out there, who nevertheless work in the games industry.
We now have six universities producing games graduates, while almost every college across the country now offers games at HNC and HND level. So where are they all going?
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