From Grand Theft Auto to Minecraft: welcome to the golden age of gaming

SCOTLAND HAS ALREADY MADE ITS MARK ON THE GAMING WORLD WITH TWO OF THE BIGGEST SUCCESSES IN THE INDUSTRY – GRAND THEFT AUTO, AND MINECRAFT. VICKY ALLAN INVESTIGATES HOW OUR VERY OWN SILICON GLEN HAS THE POTENTIAL TO REPLACE THE OIL INDUSTRY AS THE SAVIOUR

IN 1997, just two games were produced in Scotland. But one of them was the first in a franchise that would become a global phenomenon: Grand Theft Auto. Last year, according to Brian Baglow, director of the Scottish Games Network, around 100 games were developed here. Tiga, the industry’s trade association, has just released a report that shows the Scottish video games industry has experienced a huge surge, growing by 25% between December 2014 and March 2016 – more than twice the national average. Scotland’s 85 companies now employ 1,290 creative staff, and an additional 2,408 indirect jobs.

From lone indie video game developers through to the behemoths of the industry like Rockstar North, which produces Grand Theft Auto, and 4J Studios, developers of Scotland’s other global games phenomenon Minecraft, there is agreement: the games industry is the future for Scotland.

Chris van der Kuyl, the entrepreneur behind 4J Studios, says the industry “will continue to grow probably at an even more rapid pace even from here”. There’s a comparison with Minecraft. Van der Kuyl says the game “just continues to build and build. If you had said to me when we started that this would be the biggest selling game on Xbox of all time I would have laughed. Whilst we all knew it was a fantastic thing, the type of momentum that has built up has been astonishing”.

What is striking about this current phase of the industry in Scotland is its diversity. At its top end are 4J Studios and Rockstar North, but there is also a whole range of creative businesses, some of them playing with new business models. There are small indie two-person studios, networking meet-ups of young developers, “game jams” – where creatives get together to develop games in just a weekend. As Baglow puts it: “A lot of people would look at the big console games and just assume that’s the sum total of the industry, but the reality is that well over 80% now focuses purely on digital platforms: mobile, online, Facebook, social networks.”

It’s perhaps not surprising that this is the new focus. As Baglow puts it: “To do a big game like GTA that has a development budget of £176 million, now that’s not something that every company can access. That took 350 people the best part of five years. Whereas if you’re doing something online or for mobile, you can have a new game out on the market every eight to 10 weeks.”

Perhaps the biggest recent success story is Outplay, set up in Scotland’s games capital Dundee in 2011, which now employs 150 people making app games like Alien Creeps, Angry Birds Pop! and Craft Candy for the free-to-play market. It is, after Rockstar North, the largest developer in Scotland, and was formed by brothers Douglas and Richard Hare.

Their games are fun diversions to be consumed on the move. “The way that people play games nowadays,” says Hare, “a lot of it is very much on the go. It’s lots of filling in time. So it feels like it should just be a moment of delight for the person.” Their most successful game is Alien Creeps, which has been downloaded 17 million times.

Douglas says: “It’s hard to beat free. If you look at the charts, there’s the paid chart, there’s the free chart, and there’s the highest grossing chart. If you go into the grossing charts, in the top 200 there’s a handful of paid games. Free-to-play is definitely the dominant model.”

He expects the app sector he’s working in to continue to show big growth in the future, simply because of the potential audience size. “There are over seven billion people on the planet and right now when we make a game in Dundee and release it to our audience across the various platforms. Within a few hours we can potentially reach about 1.5 billion people, which is mind-boggling. But there are six billion more people yet to start playing games on smartphones. So we have enormous growth ahead of us.”

The big goal in his sector, he believes, is a game that has huge penetration on a level that Facebook already has, with its billion monthly active users. “In the next few years that game will exist,” he says.

It’s also a sign of the belief in the health of the wider Scottish games industry that Chris van der Kuyl of 4J Studios, console developer of Minecraft, is developing a commercial property in Dundee, aimed mostly at housing small games development studios. He is hugely positive about the state of the industry. “At the top end we’ve got two of the world’s biggest-selling games being developed here...but we’ve also got the most creative small businesses coming together, any of whom could have the next big thing.”

For van der Kuyl the sky is the limit. The digital industries, he observes, have the potential to be “bigger than oil”. Cara Ellison is a game designer and narrative writer – which mean she writes the scripts for games. She recently set up an Edinburgh indie meet-up group for games entrepreneurs. She was surprised, she says, to find that not only did far more people turn up than expected, but 70% of them were women, many very young.

While it’s become easier to create and distribute games, as Ellison points, out one of the problems is getting noticed. “There are thousands of millions of games on the internet and why would they choose yours? How do you make it unique and something that people really want? All of that is incredibly difficult to navigate and the number one reason why studios fail is what they make goes straight by people.”

Billy Thomson, a former designer from the early days of GTA who set up Ruffian games in Dundee, worries about the number of games simply disappearing, particularly on Steam – the digital distribution platform for multiplayer gaming and social networking. “Steam is great,” he says. “It’s almost like back to the 1980s when you could sit in your bedroom, write a game on the Spectrum, release it and make a lot of money. But there are so many great games on Steam which are hardly noticed.”

How young people are entering the games industry is changing. Rather than pursuing those few jobs in the studios, they now start out by creating their own portfolios in a new age of digital entrepreneurialism.

Vaida Plankyte, an 18-year-old designer and computing student who makes quirky games about mental health and relationships, says: “I’ve made about 30 small games. Some are really tiny but I do this thing where I create one small experiment every month and I’ve been doing that for two years.”

As Thomas Edison – one inventor who changed the world and shaped industry and the economy – said: “Genius is one per cent inspiration, 99 per cent perspiration.”

If the Scottish games industry is to become as big as oil, then that success will be built on the backs of the young people now emerging as future talent. If that’s the case