Accelerating UK games with Indielab
Indielab Games is set to provide a host of specialist regional and national accelerators to gaming start-ups. Richie Shoemaker sits down with founder and CEO Victoria Powell as the first of the programmes picks up the pace
H
aving helped a number of acclaimed TV, film and other creative projects come to fruition over the last seven years, Victoria
Powell thought to turn the organisation she founded in 2015 to supporting games. As she had found across the creative industries, there was a lack of specialist accelerator support feeding the UK games sector, and so in February launched Indielab’s West Yorkshire Game Accelerator. So well received has the programme been that Indielab Games was recently spun out – as was always the plan – with a number of regional and national accelerator programmes soon to follow over the coming weeks and months. Despite starting out in TV and running a production
company that has serviced all the major broadcasters, Powell is very much attuned to the world of games, “Actually, I started out in the 1980s, with my little ZX Spectrum, programming games and playing The Hobbit obsessively, so I was kind of part of the entertainment industry from early on.” She pauses while remembering the acclaimed text adventure whose
30 | MCV/DEVELOP June 2022
rudimentary graphics took an age to be displayed. “I loved The Hobbit.”
THERE AND BACK AGAIN Long after returning to the Shire and later establishing her production company, Powell had the opportunity to become a mentor for a Seedcamp tech accelerator, which opened her eyes to the potential for accelerator programmes for the entertainment industries. “Knowing and understanding the TV sector as I
did at the time, what I could see was that there was a huge amount of consolidation going on in the market, interestingly, just as there is with games right now. But it was very hard at the time – and this is going back seven years – for small TV businesses to really get off the ground and get going.” Thanks in part to Indielab, that situation has now
changed, and Indielab Games is looking to have the same impact on the gaming sector, having spent the last couple of years working to build a programme that can help emerging studios fulfil their potential. “West Yorkshire was our first opportunity to be able to
deliver that. It’s not intended to be a one off, it’s intended to be the first of many. So it’s a fantastic opportunity for us to be able to support a really exciting region. West
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