FOCUS FEATURE


THE GAMING INDUSTRY Mel Morris, a lifelong Derby County fan and now owner


of the football club, was one of the initial investors in King Digital Entertainment – maker of the popular Candy Crush family of games. When King Digital Entertainment floated on the Nasdaq Stock Market last year Mel’s share was reportedly valued at $400m (£278m). Once considered a UK centre of excellence for video


game development, Derby failed to feature in a recent cluster study of the sector carried out by Nesta (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), which describes itself as an innovation charity with a mission to help people and organisations bring great ideas to life. Derbyshire, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, Leicester


and Leicestershire were also noticeable by their absence. Nowadays, most games developers are based in or around


London and the Home Counties, with only 4.5% of sector firms based in the East Midlands, but that could make the East Midlands’ share of the market worth about £189m a year. There are, however, other local successes to shout about. Legendary Games, based within Chamber member


Antenna, in Nottingham, scooped the prestigious Social Game of the Year award from the Independent Games Association (TIGA), in 2015, for Year 0 Tactics, in which players lead a vicious band of marauders in a post- apocalyptic tactical battle game. The game uses cutting edge web technology and was


the first 3D web game when it debuted on Amazon Fire last year. It has tens of thousands of active users on Facebook and Google Play. The company has strong links to the Tomb Raider story.


Its Chief Technical Officer, Dr Gavin Rummery, was the last head of Core Design before it closed down, the technical lead on Tomb Raider II and a coder on the first Tomb Raider game on the PlayStation. Together with his business partner, Legendary’s Chief


Executive, Ewan Lamont, they have created a 3D web engine that underpins all of its games – which enables players to experience console-standard gameplay online – which can be applied to other areas. A major international airline and a well-known credit card


company currently use the technology that Legendary Games helped to create to monitor heat loss in their server rooms, while a major retail chain is looking at the possibility of using it to model rooms in its stores. “The technology is limitless, really,” said Ewan. “We


started out applying it only to our games but it can be used for many different things and we’re in the process of starting to work out which sectors it could benefit.” In Nottingham, a company called Lockwood became one


of the premier developers for the PlayStation platform and was voted best developer by users of PlayStation@Home for six consecutive years. Only last month, Lockwood, recently named one of the


50 most creative companies in the country by Creative England, announced plans to expand and grow the business having secured £50,000 loan funding from Nottingham’s Creative Quarter. A further positive note for the


sector came when Sumo Games, of Sheffield, opened a new studio in Nottingham, again at Antenna, in March. Headcount at the new studio is expected to hit 50 within 12 months. In addition to actual games businesses, Nottingham is


also the home of the National Videogame Arcade and the week-long annual cultural event, GameCity. In February, Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture and the Digital


Economy announced the first round of winners in the Government’s UK Games Fund, which included Nottingham- based Fallen Tree Games, which was founded in 2012 by Joe Moulding, formerly with Free Radical, and Lewis Boadle, previously with Eurocom. Free Radical created Quell, its sequel Quell Reflect and later Quell Memento. Mr Vaizey, said: “The UK is home to some of the world’s


most successful video games and this cash boost will help games companies, like Fallen Tree Games, to grow their


32 business network May 2016 Since her inception, Lara has starred in 30 video games and two Hollywood films


business and create the blockbusters of tomorrow.” It’s not just video games development that keeps the


East Midlands at the top of the gaming pile. In the north of the region, at Renishaw, a company called


Xbite has been selling video games online for a decade and is enjoying year-on-year growth from a one-man business to one now employing 75 people and with turnover in excess of £23m a year. Chamber member Xbite, which uses the name 365games


to retail online, is developing a £4.5m custom-built facility in 2016 and is seeking new business developments, including web services, tech hardware, clothing and even high-fashion. And in Nottingham, SMS Electronics was commissioned


last year to make Sir Clive Sinclair’s Vega gaming console. The Vega is a handheld device, preloaded with 1,000


games previously available on Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum products of the 1980s, which plugs into a TV to play. SMS Electronics has made 7,500 Vega consoles so far


and is gearing up now to make its successor, the Vega+, which will carry the same games and still play through a TV but also has a screen so that it can be played anywhere. The Vega ventures were crowd-funded and orders so far


suggest an initial production run of about 4,000 Vega+ consoles. SMS Electronics not only manufactures the consoles it


also handles all direct sales for Sinclair. “Many companies wanting electronic devices look to


China first for manufacture, but all they will get is mass- produced products shipped back which they then have to distribute. “We knew we had to offer more, so


we manage everything from design to direct sales, which makes us competitive,” said Craig Taylor, Finance Director at SMS Electronics. Vega+ production will start in the


summer and could be in shops before Christmas. Building on the success of its work


with Sinclair, SMS Electronics has secured an


order from security firm Cocoon Alarm, of Leeds, which had previously planned to manufacture in China. Moving away from the realms of digitised imagery and


consoles, another Nottingham gaming success story is that of Games Workshop, which employs around 1,750 people and designs and manufactures miniature wargame figurines. It is behind the Warhammer series of games and a


strategy battle game based on the Lord of the Rings franchise. It retains control over every aspect of its product, selling through a chain of more than 300 stores nationwide and more than 4,000 other toy and hobby shops around the world, as well as via mail order and online.


Year O Tactics won Social Game of the Year


‘Legendary Games, based within Chamber member Antenna, in Nottingham, scooped the prestigious Social Game of the Year award in 2015, for Year 0 Tactics’


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