The Sustainability Programme

The BGI’s sustainability programme seeks to educate the public including students, games companies, investors and public bodies about sustainable games development through a series of educational initiatives, either directly or in collaboration with other organisations:

  • Provide vocational training to students and young people about how to start up and grow a sustainable games company, drawing from the latest research.
  • Provide vocational training to individuals in games companies to ensure they use the latest best practice to create sustainable companies.
  • Provide vocational training to private and public funding sources to educate them how games are made, what success looks like and what games can deliver.


Opportunities from the games sector

The games market is growing at around 7% per annum and the UK has produced some of the world’s finest games companies, whose products usually rank the UK in the top 5 games-producing nations globally. We have over 1,200 games development companies, including over 800 studios, and 13,000 in the development workforce, filled with creative technologists with uniquely transferable skills. The potential for break-out hits has no better poster child than the fastest selling entertainment product of all time, the Grand Theft Auto series which is developed in Edinburgh.

Games add over £1.5 billion in GVA to the UK economy from this thriving, rapidly growing sector whose development hubs are spread right across the UK (only 22% of developers work in London). The games sector has attracted tens of thousands of graduates from bespoke degrees into the workforce since 2010, whose highly transferable, creative technology skills are highly sought after by other sectors, especially financial services and other media. Games are a poster child for the UK’s creative industries, being an export-driven, high margin, knowledge economy sector that generates valuable IP from cutting edge commercial models and attracts inward investment into the UK from around the world, particularly China, US and Japan.

Challenges to sustainability in games development

Despite the above success, most of the UK’s games developers still face significant challenges in creating sustainable businesses:

  • Most games companies still struggle to raise finance above £50,000 due to investors’ lack of understanding and experience in the games market.
  • Most of the UK’s smallest games studios struggle to grow. A massive rise in the number of studios with under 5 staff since 2010 has not yielded a similar rise in the number of studios are small companies with 5-15 staff which suggests that small studios struggle to grow.
  • Hundreds of creative individuals, often from film or TV, start up a games studios but don’t have access to management or financial skills education to assist them in raising finance for games development and company growth, which limits their scale and commercial potential.
  • 95% of games studios seeking institutional finance fail to do so due to a lack of understanding within the private (but also public) organisations who manage such funding.

The above challenges combine to create serious impediments to the sustainability of many games studios. Up to 12% of UK games studios close their doors every year, a mortality rate that is nearly 50% higher than other UK creative sectors.


Yet the games industry has the potential to impact the public by growing more sustainably and contributing even more to the UK economy as well as providing a wide range of job opportunities for future generations. An educational programme that provides vocational training to students, studios and investors will have wide-ranging benefit in raising the level of understanding amongst the recipients of its sustainable games development training programmes.


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