Every month an industry leader wraps up MCV/DEVELOP with their unique insight
The Final Boss
What’s been the highlight of your career so far? I’m incredibly proud of the studio that I’ve built with my co-founders, Benni Hill and Harry Corr. We formed Bonsai Collective in 2019, and we’ve just hit our five-year anniversary as a studio. We’ve built an incredible team of talented people. Together, we have built our first game, Luna Abyss, which has won and been nominated for over 20 awards even prior to release. We’re honoured to have been selected for “Best of British ‘’ in the London Games Festival Official Selection and nominated for Best Sound and Best Art at Gamescom LatAm, and many more - some of which haven’t been announced yet! As a publishing producer at Team17, it was
a real highlight to work with many developers and learn so much about indie development and setting up a studio. I’ve also freelanced in Production and bizdev for a range of indie and AAA studios. During this time I was able to build up knowledge in leadership, production, bizdev and marketing, which has all been instrumental to putting Bonsai Collective on the map.
challenges that the games industry has had as a whole for the last couple of years. I want to see improved wellbeing, diversity and inclusion for the games industry as a whole too. Spaces like the UK Games Industry slack and Limit Break have been instrumental in connecting people together, and supporting mentorship programs. I want Bonsai Collective to be in a position to sponsor initiatives like these in the future too, so that we can support others in instilling the values that we share.
Finally - one of my biggest joys has been sitting in Discord calls with our lovely Bonsai Collective team when we’ve made announcements about Luna Abyss. Seeing our team’s joy when celebrating the initial announcement for Luna Abyss and our other trailer reveals has been incredible. The reaction from the community has been amazing too, for our trailer releases and when we’ve showcased our demo.
Hollie Emery, co-founder and managing director at Bonsai Collective
What do you see as the gaming industry’s biggest challenges in the years ahead? Will it be able to overcome them? We’ve seen a number of challenges across the games industry in the past few years. On an investment front - high interest rates have slowed fresh funding entering businesses and investors and publishers are simply not investing like they used to. Investors are being more risk-averse, resulting in further redundancies, studio closures, and added pressures to studio founders. Once we see those interest rates drop, investors are more likely to invest into games again. On a studio front - the impact of the pandemic is still felt; many larger studios grew and invested too quickly and it became unsustainable once
What ambitions do you have for the future of Bonsai and the industry as a whole? We definitely don’t shy away from ambition - being a team of 17 working on a first person shooter has been challenging but massively rewarding. When we first set out to make a first person shooter with bullet hell mechanics, we were told it couldn’t be done; making a game in our genre with a team of our size - but we have achieved that, and so much more. We want to be one of the UK’s best developers for narrative- driven first person shooters. We want to be industry leaders in studio team well-being, diversity and inclusion. And we want to lead by example for existing studios - and new studios forming after
unit sales returned to pre-pandemic levels. We’re also seeing a huge drop in visibility to newly launched games due to the sheer number of releases happening at the moment. The space has become more competitive in recent years as developers fight to maintain visibility on platform store fronts and social media. I’ve seen a rise in communities focused on helping developers and publishers market their games, which has been a real positive - shout out to the How to Market Your Game Discord and also gameconfguide, both of which have been very useful resources on our journey to increase visibility for Luna Abyss.
Another big positive is that the games industry is still continuing
to grow at a steady pace - if you look at stastica’s analysis of the UK games industry growth rate - people are still buying and playing games more each year, and user bases are continuing to grow. That’s a great sign that when funding starts to flow again, that the industry will blossom once more.
50 | MCV/DEVELOP June/July 2024
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