Up to Sheffield

This week we’ve been on the road, visiting Sheffield to meet with a local infrastructure provider, see a games co-working space that’s just opened, meet Sheffield Hallam and chat with Ian Goodall from Aardvark Swift about their many innovative skills programmes…

BGI CEO Rick attended the unveiling of the Tencent deal with the Department of International Trade to collaborate with our creative industries. This was Rick says a welcome initiative but the DIT’s response to it was slightly odd.

“Tencent makes over half its total revenues from games, which also generate the lion’s share of their profits. When Tencent spoke about their involvement with the UK to date, they kept mentioning games investments in fantastic British games companies like Miniclip and Frontier. When UK representatives spoke about opportunities to collaborate with creative industries, there was basically no mention of games at all! Instead we got 4 marketing agency showreels and some biotech. Framestore got a look in but DIT appear to have missed a trick with no representation of games, no discussion of games and mention of games beyond something buried in the press release. That’s a lost opportunity. Nevertheless I did find the Tencent games person and we started a useful dialogue.”

Look out for new board members

We’ve been busy on-boarding new board members, 8 since the Board met in late March. Rick said:

 “I can’t wait to unveil the new members voted in by the Board. We are building a fantastic spread of new board members with diverse voices and deep experience from right across the sector. Watch this space.”

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