The South tends to dominate the United Kingdom. London in particular tends to absorb all jobs and opportunities like a black hole. And, of course, the main UK gaming industry conference, Developis about as south as you can get on the (sometimes) sunny shores of Brighton.
Look at map of UK gaming companiesand you will see that London looks like a giant red sun. But there are plenty of smaller suns in other parts of the country—and many of these more northern suns are already pretty tired of traveling hundreds of miles south every time they want to make a business deal or network with their industry peers. Newcastle GameHorizon Eventrecently produced GamesIndustry.bizsought to support the northern part of the country, but proved unstable and ceased to exist in 2014. More recently, Develop:North did not return from its 2024 debut, leaving locals to choose between Develop:Brighton in the south or DICE Europe in the north.
Enter new horizons. Gaming business network Game Republicunder the leadership of Dr Jackie Mulligan and Jamie Sefton, has been tirelessly promoting gaming companies in the north for over a decade, organizing around a dozen events each year, attended by the likes of Team17 and Radical Forge. But New Horizons is their big game in a nationally ranked Development conference.
Judging by the turnout this week, they may be on to something.
The conference kicked off on Wednesday evening with a VIP reception on the roof terrace of Double Eleven's Middlesbrough headquarters, an impressively appointed building that drew plenty of envious oohs and ahhs from attendees. In a packed lecture hall, Mulligan laid out his ambition: this conference was not just for people in the north, it was for everyone in the UK.
The key will be to convince these Londoners to actually take the northbound train. Looking around the room, this first event was still dominated by locals such as representatives from Tanglewood Games and Observer Interactive. But the speaker, Lasse Seppänen, general manager of Supercell's London office, has been persuaded to leave the Essex event horizon – and perhaps more will follow suit in the future as news of the conference spreads.
Thursday's main event took place at Middlesbrough FC's Riverside Stadium, a new and rather impressive conference venue. A series of glass-fronted conference rooms offered magnificent views of the pristine pitch, and the linear layout of the stadium ultimately benefited the conference. The meeting rooms and cafeteria were located in the center, with the main stage and a small meeting room on either side, meaning that participants were guaranteed to pass each other as they moved from one event to the next: an ideal place for networking and impromptu conversations. The only downside was that the exhibition area – several demos of upcoming games – was located outside the secondary meeting room, meaning that it was rarely visited as far as I could see.
A variety of talks were well organized, with fireside chats on hot topics such as transmedia and the importance of international markets such as China, as well as interview with Axel Torvenius from MachineGames about the creation of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The only slightly confusing booking was the conversation between GamesIndustry.biz graduate Chris Dring and Taskmaster member Macy Adam at the end of the day.
Dring initially admitted that he wasn't entirely sure why a games journalist was interviewing a comedian, and Adam happily admitted that she knew very little about video games. The pair bravely spent the next half hour or so trying to find a connection between the worlds of comedy and gaming – with only partial success – before finally taking part in a very foul-mouthed round of EA Sports FC. It was a strange end to a gaming business conference, but a fun one nonetheless.
Overall, the sold-out conference was a good start to what we hope will become an annual event, with early bird tickets already sold out. on sale next year at a significant discount of £89 to entice early adopters. And if there's one thing that will convince Southerners to make the trip north, it's the relative bang for their buck they'll get from paying through the nose for similar conferences elsewhere. Anyone who has been trying to find temptingly priced accommodation in Brighton in the run-up to Develop will be pleasantly surprised at the reasonableness of hotels in the North East.
Perhaps this will be enough. And perhaps New Horizons will help shift the UK gaming industry's center of gravity a little further north. But even if the southerners don't come, the north now has an event to be proud of.
