NESTA games event report

NESTA announced their support for the game industry at a launch event yesterday. There were a few short speeches from a somewhat eclectic mix of people including Rory Cellan Jones (BBC Technology Correspondent), Adam Gee (Channel 4), Paul Durrant (Dare to be Digital), Richard Wilson (TIGA), Jon Kingsbury (NESTA), and Charles Cecil (Revolution Software). Frank Boyd (Unexpected Media) also said a few words about his creative labs and Crossover in particular.

While this was an interesting line up, I was disappointed to have little in the way of developers represented. Even Charles – who seems to be stalking me at events this year(!) – is more of an IP holder and outsources his development these days. In fact, I was one of very few people there, if there were any others at all, representing pc/console studios; I wouldn’t class our little indie outfit as mainstream either.

Adam Gee spoke about 4IP, a £50 million 2 year fund which “aims to deliver publicly valuable content and services on digital media platforms with significant impact and in sustainable ways.” Roughly translated, they’ll part or fully fund innovative interactive projects across almost any platform – no requirement for a television component. Indies, get yourself on their mail list right now – this could be for you. I’ll write more on 4IP in the future. It should be noted that Channel 4 are already working with Introversion according to Adam Gee, although I’m not sure he was supposed to let that slip yesterday.

Rory Cellan Jones made the point that, as a journalist, he finds it very hard to talk to the game industry, including to some of our trade associations. I found that quite a surprising comment and I wondered if one or two indies may be able to get some TV time if they play clever.

I spoke briefly to Richard Wilson of TIGA over the better than average buffet lunch – no soggy egg mayo sarnies here! I’ve generally had the opinion that TIGA are for the bigger boys and nothing to do with us, but there is a sense that this may change. Richard seems quite keen to provide more support for smaller developers. We shall see.

As for the support itself, that is to be delivered in four components: Crossover, company mentoring, a resource sharing portal and a new talent initiative. I may talk a little more about these in a future post, partly to give myself time to digest the options. Each of these has potential but, Crossover apart, a lot will depend upon the actual implementation. Crossover is something I already know about and thoroughly recommend.