The United Kingdom has a strong history of videogame development, stretching right back to the days of 8-bit microcomputers and the famous ‘bedroom coders’ of the late 70s and early 80s. While these days coders and developers are far more likely to work in snazzy offices, Britain still remains close to the cutting edge of videogame development, as shown by new data from TIGA.
TIGA is a network of developers, digital publishers and trade associations representing the videogame industry. The data released by TIGA shows some of the latest trends and developments for the UK videogame industry.
The data shows that the largest proportion of UK studios remained focussed on development for mobile platforms such as iOS and Android, with 45% of UK studios having this has it main focus, though but only employing 21% of development staff. Studios focussed on console videogames employed 47% of development staff, though such studios only make up 14% of the market. This reflects a long-standing involvement by the UK in the console market.
Interestingly, immersive videogame categories such as augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) and virtual reality (VR) are the fastest growing new games categories according to the report. This continues the upward trend observed by TIGA. 37 UK-based development studios are now involved in immersive videogme development, up from 20 studios in March 2016.
TIGA CEO Dr Richard Wilson, OBE, said: “14 per cent of UK studios are focused mainly on console development. This category remains the largest employer of development staff by a long distance, employing nearly half of all UK development staff. This confirms the UK’s well established reputation as one of the leading console games development nations and the significantly higher resources and teams required for console games development.
Virtual and Augmented Reality is the fastest growing games category for studios by number, for the second year running, and we expect Augmented Reality, in particular, to become more important in the coming year.”
Further news on reports and developments within the VR/AR/MR industry will be right here on VRFocus.