Liverpool has a long history of game development. The days of Sony’s Studio Liverpool pumping out Hacienda-inspired racing classics like WipEout might be long gone, and the development scene in the city seemed to struggle after the iconic PlayStation studio closed ♎down. But more games than you think are being made in the city to this day.
TheGamer visited Ripstone studio a f🅠ew months ago to check out development on its Queen’s Gambit mobile game, and at last week’s GameChangers launch I met with devs comiꦰng together from across the city’s various studios, from those working on VR titles of NDA-ed IP, to Lawn Mowing Simulator. All these developers, a room of 70 or 80, had united with one shared goal in mind: to get more locals into game development.
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GameChangers is spearheaded by members of numerous local studios, but this evening was le♔d by Jamie Brayshaw, head of marketing at Ripstone. He moderates a panel of developers and educators in a Liverpool bar, who explain exactly wꦚhat GameChangers is, and why the city is coming together to offer more opportunities to the people of Liverpool.
The idea of G🍃ameChangers is that studios will come together from across the city to offer opportunities within the industry. A lot of the focus is on young people, but they’re keen to point out that people of any age can take on apprenticeships or upskill themselves. The example Brayshaw gives me is of going into schools and discussing jobs in the games sector with parents of kids as young as 11. He says he’s done it on behalf of Ripstone before, opening parents’ eyes to the potential of the industry, but multiple studios working together would have a far greater impact.
Numerous studios hav🍌e signed up as founders of GameChangers, including Ripstone, Avalanche Studios Group (Mad Max, Just Cause), Firesprite (Horizon: Call of the Mountain), Skyhook Games (of lawn mowing fame), Lucid Games (support on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Apex Legends), Wushu Studios, and D3T. Birkenhead-based micro-studio Scenegraph Studios is the smallest developer founding the project, and that’s why work isn’t being distributed equally. Scene♕graph may only be able to take on a single work experience student, or offer one talk in a local school, but it can share its findings with the group and everyone will be better off for its input.
Brayshaw shares his goal of having a Game♉Changer connection to every careers guidance officer in the Liverpool City Region, working with them to give students opportunities in the industry, whether that be work experience, internships, or apprenticeships. In turn, every developer in the initi🍬ative will come together to share their feedback with one another to assess where the recruiting focus needs to be. Perhaps there’s a lack of UI artists in Liverpool studios? Then they would tailor their efforts to recruiting UI artists, together.
The system was appar🐈ently mooted a few years ago, but studios were hesitant to share for fear of potential recrui𒈔ts being cannibalised by rival studios. That mindset has changed now, for reasons not entirely clear, and this co-operative endeavour hopes to benefit the whole city, from the students to the studios.
Gill Walsh, strategic careers hub lead at the Liverpool City Region Careers Hub, is on board from the opposite angle. She hopes to facilitate talks in schools and smooth the pipeline for kids interested in game development to stay in the city. The industry contributes around £50 million to theꦦ local economy every year, she explains, and kids are interested in being a part of gaming’s north-west expansion.
I meet people from many walks of life at the GameChangers launch event. Recruiters, developers, burgeoning creatives. J🌞oe Keegan is an employee broker at the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, and he’s a part of GameChangers to try to help the studios access government funding for things like apprenticeships. The local authority often has a use-it-or-lose-it pot of money from the government for these sorts of things, he tells me, and he wants to keep the money in the local region.
For the bigger developers, not much changes. They do the same talks in schools, they offer the same work experience opportunities. But they share their findings with each other, working together as a collective for thඣe betterment of the city’s industry as a whole. This will make an even bigger di꧑fference to smaller developers like Scenegraph, who have far less bandwidth for this sort of thing, but can chip in where they can.
It’ll make a difference to the region’s kids, too, and GameChangers hopes to open opportunities to those who are less represented in the industry by simply being able to offer more.
It’s an initiative that feels uniquely Liverpool in many ways, and I tell Brayshaw as much. The city has a spirit of cooperation and looking out for one another and, despite many of the devs involved coming to the city from afar, they’re embracing this spirit. Brayshaw, a Leeds United fan, immediately references Liverpool FC’s iconic anthem, You’ll Never Walk Alone, and how in times of importance, the red and blue halves of the city have always come together. The arch-rivals forget about their differences when tragedy strikes, whether it be to support the survivors of the Hillsborough disaster or honour the memories of children like Rhys 🃏Jones and Olivia Pratt-Korbel. The rivalry is transcended by togetherness, and the city’s game developers take as much inspiration from the city as they give back.
GameChangers is a nobl💫e initiative, and it’s incredibly heartening to see developers from a host of studios come together in a time when we’re seeing unprecedented layoffs in the industry. Much of this work is being done in developers’ own time, for no pay, for the greater good. Working with each other eases the strenuous loads for everyone involved, and GameChangers promises great things for this wonderful city.
Brayshaw promises this is a “historic moment” for the city’s games industry and, whether GameChangers succeeds in its goals or not, I can’t help but agree. Liverpool’s collaboration feels at odds with Microsoft’s mass consolidation, it feels like a ray of hope in the face of Epic’s layoffs. It may not be enough to stave off the darker aspects of shareholder-pleasing capitalist practices, but if i🎀t helps even one local child get a foothold in the industry, then it’s succeeded. Liverpool may not be making WipEout any more, but one of its schoolchildren could make Lawn Mowing Simulator 2, and that’s a win in my book.