GREEN MAN ON A MISSION


BRITAIN’S GOT GAMING TALENT


The future of British gaming is regional, digital and connected By Paul Sulyok, Founder and CEO of Green Man Gaming


I


n the past, building a successful gaming business was often a story about location. If you wanted to build a fast-growing company, attract top-tier talent and raise capital, you were expected to be in the “right” place. That assumption still shapes many corporate decisions. But in digital industries like video games, it holds back businesses, workers, and the economy.


The video games industry is global, digital and export driven by nature. A release does not grow neatly from one territory to the next. Players turn up wherever they are, from Land’s End to John o’ Groats, and a business either learns to operate across countries and continents quickly or it falls behind. That reality shaped Green Man Gaming from the beginning. Almost immediately, demand came from markets we had not prioritised. As a result, we built a global network of publishers, studios and developers with the capabilities to connect players to games all over the world. It is not a model designed around a single office.


This is why it has become important for us to partner with studios and developers outside of major cities and to build remote teams.


In 2025, the UK’s domestic games sector supported over 73,000 jobs and generated around £12 billion in Gross Value Added (GVA) annually [source: TIGA Industry Report]. Approximately three-quarters of all games development staff work outside the capital [source: Scottish Games Report]. Across the country, these studios and


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developers are deeply rooted in their local economies but sell to global audiences. These include Codemasters in Warwickshire, Rebellion in Oxford, Double Eleven in Middlesbrough and Doublesix in Manchester. Well known studios are also found across the country; from Cambridgeshire to Wales, and the West Midlands.


“It is not a model designed around a single office.”


These businesses show how high-value, globally traded digital work is already embedded in towns and regions across the UK. Regional game clusters deliver measurable benefits: high-paying tech jobs, local contributions to Gross Added Value, and knock-on effects for local supply chains and education. In places dotted around the UK, games studios have become anchors for local ecosystems, driving opportunities and spending. This is why treating remote hiring as


a culture war, or as something that only benefits employees, misses the point. Hiring employees who live across the UK spreads income and opportunity. Skilled workers can stay in their communities rather than having to relocate to a handful of expensive, congested cities to earn a good salary.


Research suggests that increased home working has already shifted billions of pounds of consumer spending out of UK city centres and into local towns and villages [source: Report from the University of Nottingham, Sheffield and Birmingham]; as people spend more where they live rather than where they commute to. From a company perspective, the benefits of distributed models are practical. We widen the talent pool by hiring the best people wherever they are. Green Man Gaming employees live in every corner of the UK. Without a central office we are granted the flexibility to allocate capital where talent and opportunities lie, rather than locking resources into one place. Some of the most creative and commercially successful ideas come from teams collaborating widely, where value comes from different perspectives. The question I am left with is why so many leaders still resist the reality that success today is less about where you are based, and more about how connected you are. Value is created by moving information, talent and intellectual property across borders effectively and intelligently.


This is why the debate about locations is so often misplaced. Rather than fixating on work from home days, companies should be focusing on how effectively they can operate across its partners, customers and ecosystem. If there is one lesson from building a global digital business over the past 16 years, it is that you no longer need to be in the “right” place; you need to build the right regional and international networks.


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