Will Eastcott

The Creative Wales' Games Development Fund Creative Wales / Cymru Greadigol is taking steps to help grow the Welsh video games sector. The Creative Wales / Cymru Greadigol Games Development Fund has announced that 12 studios will share over £580,000 to help them develop innovative video games and immersive experiences for commercial release. The funding, offered at £10,000 to £50,000 per project, is aimed at bringing fresh gaming concepts to market. The programme encourages new creative concepts with robust market strategies, supporting businesses on their way to achieving self-sustaining growth. Recipients span the breadth of Wales, with successful applicants based in locations from Caernarfon to Pembrokeshire and with their content varying from quests set in the rural mountains, to virtual reality experiences and Welsh mythology-inspired adventures. This fund is part of a raft of initiatives Creative Wales offers the games industry, including the Scale Up Fund, which recently awarded £850,000 to 6 Welsh companies; supporting numerous studios to join a trade mission to the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco earlier this year, as well as another trade trip planned for next month to Slush 2025, in partnership with Games London. Find out more at https://www.creative.wales.

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This is a real imposter syndrome moment. What we have here are two absolute procedural geniuses and one extrovert, delivering an introduction to the Apparance Runtime Procedural Generation System. In all seriousness, this is going to be an amazing workshop where we can cater for all skill levels, from absolute beginners who I can help get up to speed, to the artists looking to push their technical boundaries which Oliver Lawson will show the way through to the absolute wizard and creator of Apparance, Sam Swain to help the more experienced get the most out of the session.

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Hugely excited for our announcement tomorrow at GDC Festival of Gaming! The debate about AI in games has become ever more polarised - with people either violently rejecting it, or blindly succumbing to our new big tech overlords. At Meaning Machine we've always tried to hold a position of nuance. Everything bad you say about AI? We're almost certainly agree with it. But equally we also believe that generative technology has the potential to be truly transformative for interactive entertainment - if only the human author can seize control of its power. Our talk at GDC, in partnership with University of Bristol's Richard Cole, will provide nuance by putting the player at the heart of the debate. It delivers some of the very first insight into what players ACTUALLY feel about AI in a game - when they experience it firsthand. Going beyond marketing surveys, culture wars, and hype bubbles. Can't wait to share the findings with the world!

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Following up on my previous post about using Modular Rig for simple environment animation, but this time focusing on a mechanical prop. This prop uses slightly more complex module than the previous one, and the results were honestly a bit surprising (in a good way). ➤ What worked well ✅ Moving beyond single-joint motion is doable, as long as the prop parts are spitted with animation in mind. ✅ Building a skeleton and painting skin weights directly in Unreal works well for this prop, which has a moderate complexity. ✅ Mechanical modules like Hinge and Piston are already well supported out of the box and easy to reason about. ➤ Where friction shows up ⚠️ This still isn’t a full DCC replacement. The quality of the result depends heavily on how well the asset is designed and segmented upfront. ➤ Bigger takeaway For me, this reinforced that Modular Rig lowers the barrier to keeping work entirely in-engine and expands what environment art and level design can include, especially for smaller projects where DCC round-trips aren’t available or are too costly. On top of that, it could potentially enable iteration to happen directly in the level. Still exploring, but I’m curious how others are thinking about where this kind of workflow fits into their pipelines. 🤔 #UnrealEngine #UE5 #TechnicalAnimation #GameDev #TechnicalArt #LevelDesign #ControlRig #AnimationPipeline

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The policy team at Ukie (or more properly IES) has released its #manifesto in the run-up to the Scottish Parliament elections. It's a great piece of work, very strong and focused on growing understanding and recognition of the games sector, introducing funding and a new focus on education and skills. Sound familiar? It's entirely aligned with the five key recommendations of our own #LevelUp: Scotland's Games Action Plan, which we published in January. However, LevelUp is already with the Business & Employment minister, with a pledge to attend the next cross-party group meeting at the Scottish Parliment for a line-by-line review. That date is awaiting final confirmation. Find the manifesto and read more here: (And if you've not yet read, or left a statement of support for #LevelUp, there's still time. Full details on the SGN website).

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We’re right in the middle of interviews for our next cohort—and it’s been incredibly busy in the best possible way. Applications have been hugely positive this year, with real growth in interest. What’s especially encouraging is that, while much of our outreach has focused on the North and North West, we’re also seeing strong engagement from the South of England. Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen exceptional work, genuine drive, and exciting talent. Even more valuable have been the conversations about games—and making games—that continue to fuel my own commitment to delivering what we set out to achieve at TGA. From the beginning, I made a simple decision: everyone who applies deserves the opportunity for an interview. Where possible, this is in person; when travel is a barrier, we meet remotely. For many applicants, this is their first formal step toward a career in the games industry, and they deserve time to ask questions, share ambitions, and explore whether this path is right for them. When people are being asked to invest significant money—and take on years of student debt—decisions should be informed, personal, and rooted in real conversation, not just paperwork. Portfolios are central to this process. They allow applicants to demonstrate skill, passion, and potential, and the discussions around them often reveal far more than what’s initially submitted. Just as importantly, the interview ensures that the decision is mutual. Even when TGA isn’t the right pathway, no one should leave without feedback, guidance, and a clearer sense of direction. There are many routes into the games industry, and different journeys can still lead to the same goal. What matters most to us is simple: every applicant deserves time, respect, and a genuine conversation before making such an important decision about their future. That belief sits at the heart of how we interview, how we review portfolios, and how we support people—whether they join TGA or take a different path into the industry. Because meaningful education—and lasting careers in games—begin with being seen, heard, and understood. #GamesEducation #HigherEducation #StudentSuccess #FutureTalent #EarlyCareers

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Time to mix things up a bit for our Games London Accelerator... Life to date for Games London, we’ve run biz dev training and learning programmes supporting over 250+ games businesses. We launched the first Games London Pitch Bootcamp in 2017 and set the ball rolling on a long-running programme for talent development in UK and London games businesses that eventually led to the Games London Accelerator and then Game Changer. And what was a novelty is now widespread – about 10 more comparable programmes have cropped up nationally and regionally, which is great to see. So for our next Games London Accelerator we are laser-focusing on a specific theme: creating quality IP that can compete globally. This is one of the next big challenges for UK games businesses. Where is the next Gang Beasts or Fall Guys going to come from? How can we enable new developers' creative abilities to build game worlds that cross mediums and platforms? What’s the secret to enduring ideas that cut through the discovery noise? The ‘Unlocking IP’ edition of our Games London Accelerator is open for applications now. UK-wide applications are welcome for this one. The programme runs Jan to March with showcase opportunities at London Games Festival for successful participants. We’ve enlisted two great anchor mentors for next year - Christian Fonnesbech and Jennifer Schneidereit. Christian will even run a free pre-Accelerator masterclass for perspective applicants. Plus we have fantastic experts lined up to run workshops and studio visits. Extra details below including registration link:

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Games Industry Predictions for 2026 I want to share a set of personal predictions that reflect only my views and do not represent my employer, our community, or anyone else. These come from three years of our community’s data, insight from the 5,000 plus studios and partners connected to our network, and many polls and conversations with you. I am not putting hard numbers on most of these yet, but I am confident enough in the direction of these trends to offer these conclusions. In 2026 1. The velocity and magnitude of games hiring will continue to increase The recovery trend is real and accelerating. 2. Layoffs will remain in a similar magnitude ballpark to 2025 Stability will improve but not dramatically. 3. New entrants and attempted entrants will continue to accelerate Including graduates, lateral movers, and those laid off. 4. Early career pressure will remain extremely high I do not see entry challenges easing yet. 5. A rising share of laid off games professionals will find work outside games Despite point 1, the pressure of point 3 will still challenge point 1. 6. The share of open roles in North America and Western Europe will continue to decrease Opportunities will grow in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Asia. 7. A greater share of total production load will continue shifting to external development and contractors Studios will rely on distributed talent more than ever. 8. The average individual’s purchase of full price AAA games will remain flat or decline Prices are challenging in a tough macroeconomic environment, and, particularly, long running series compete with their own cheaper older entries. 9. Indie games will remain the majority of top critical titles Independent creators will continue to shape many celebrated releases. 10. The share of roles in North America will diversify slightly away from the top five states and regions Cost pressures will keep reshaping hiring footprints. 11. Gaps in supply and demand for the most competitive fields like game design, writing, and narrative will get worse Openings remain tight while demand rises. 12. Placement rates will, relatively, improve for mid career professionals with 5-15 years of experience A few fields will remain heavily oversubscribed. I know this reads as a tough picture. It is tough. But I do not believe in most apocalyptic scenarios. I believe it will keep becoming a more globally employed sector with downward pressure on compensation as similar quality talent emerges at lower cost locations. Discoverability will get harder and creators will need to adapt to new influencer driven and socially driven paths for players to find their work. Opportunity will still come from democratized access and the ability for anyone to create something great. The biggest challenges will be at the AAA level where costs remain high. Many teams risk staying locked in a hit or miss survival cycle. I hope more teams break out of that cycle and experiment with new approaches.

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Something we noticed when running GameDiscoverCo: when you have 'all the data', finding people the _right_ data to show them can be surprisingly difficult. So kudos to Valve for updating Steam's official Steamworks data tools in a much better way, so you can see the effect of your Steam discounts! They've stepped up with this new discount history option in Steamworks, "split out to align with the time frame for each of the past discounts you've run." So you see the name of the sale, the number of units, the revenue, and the price. It’s not as sophisticated as some solutions out there, but it's free and human-readable, folks: https://lnkd.in/d8QZnJWa

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"Cornwall’s games industry is proven, cost-efficient, entrepreneurial, talent-rich, export-focused and culturally significant. What it lacks is structural backing proportionate to its demonstrated return. Its high potential ceiling with strong local talent and creative culture coupled with lower average running cost and burn rates makes it an incredible slice of the industry to invest in and engage with on work-for-hire projects." Opportunity in the West for smart investment. Great report Cornwall Games.

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72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games. Conducted by Atomik Research, 306 industry executives were surveyed across the UK and USA. 75% of respondents were senior managers or C-suite level, with 77% from studios with more than 50 employees. The study found that for most studios, Steam accounts for over 75% of revenue. In US law, you’d need to either control the production pipeline top to bottom, or hold a dominant share through acquisitions of competitors. Steam does neither. Valve hasn’t bought out rivals and it doesn’t own all the studios that make the games sold through its store. What it does own is competence, and that’s where this whole argument starts to fall apart. Almost every other storefront has had years to compete, and almost all have stumbled. This isn’t a case of Valve killing competition. The competition just keeps shooting itself in the foot. Steam spent years refining features that now define the PC ecosystem: cloud saves, remote play, Workshop mods, forums, reviews, refund policies, and Proton support for Linux users. It built hardware, an OS, and a handheld that all tie back into the same ecosystem. Most importantly, it kept the service stable, predictable, and user-focused. That level of reliability became its moat. What developers call a monopoly is often just a reflection of consumer trust. Steam is where people go because they know their games, progress, and friends will still be there in a decade. It’s not market manipulation it’s consistency. If studios think they “rely too heavily” on Steam, that says more about their alternatives than about Valve itself. No one forced them to abandon their own launchers or build weak ones. Consumers simply migrate to what works best for them. It’s worth remembering that monopolies aren’t defined by popularity or market share alone. A monopoly becomes illegal when it restrains competition. Steam hasn’t done that. It hasn’t blocked other stores, locked content, or acquired rivals. It just runs the best version of what everyone else keeps trying to make. The day someone builds a better, more reliable, more feature-rich service, Steam will finally have a real challenger. Until then, calling it a monopoly is just a way to avoid admitting the obvious: they aren’t trying to kill their competition. Their competition is almost non-existent.

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Due to some unexpected availability here at Engage Software we've decided to spend some time consolidating our mixed reality development know-how into a playable feature demo to show off what we can do. In the last week we've put a fresh project together in Unreal 5.6, made a few initial prototypes (see below), and have builds uploading to the Meta store. The demo has no dynamic lighting at all. The space inside the doorway has baked static lighting, whilst everything else uses a simple unlit shader with a colour parameter to control the 'light' (seen changing as the white balls go through the doorway, and when the alarm light is flashing). MR-wise, we have the passthrough camera feed matching the scene lighting, and physics objects colliding with the user's play space which embed objects in the player's real environment. One really great effect in MR is extending the play space. Here we have a two examples of holes through to virtual spaces. They have both a visual hole (in the passthrough camera feed) and a hole in the play space collision. This is just a quick preview, I'll be posting more next week once we have some interactions in. If you'd like an invite to play the demo, or to discuss a project, drop me a message. Sam #MR #XR #UnrealEngine #UE5

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The Deadline Defenders. The Final Act Heroes. These are some of the phrases being thrown around (mainly by me lol) when referring to The 444 Group. We’re currently supporting multiple studios and high-growth brands in late-stage scale-up phases, brought in specifically to clear backlogs, stabilise pipelines, and drive content cleanly toward fixed release windows. Across 2025 and into 2026, this is where we’re most often called upon. The message is usually straightforward: “We have a date. We have a backlog. Can you jump in?” Our answer is just as simple: we’ll start tomorrow. As one recent high profile partner shared: “444 Group were a huge help catching us up in production. The team integrated quickly and delivered exactly what we needed.” When deadlines are locked and polish matters, elastic, cost-effective production capacity becomes critical. If there’s pressure building anywhere in your pipeline art, engineering, cinematics, tech art, UI/UX, porting, QA, we can drop in fast, integrate cleanly, and help you de-risk delivery without slowing momentum. If that sounds useful, happy to have a short conversation.

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Games people in the UK - please submit a response to the BBC Charter Review before Tuesday. This is a unique opportunity to help shape an institution that could have a massive impact on the UK games industry. UKIE have provided an easy step-by-step guide below to identify the key sections you need to answer, and some suggestions for how to do it, which you can and should adapt to reflect your views.

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On 20th November we hit a milestone For those of you that know I've been working on improving Localised Ai Memory. It's my belief that we should own our data and not rely on software companies as they introduce an element of counter party risk to security and privacy. I've been working with Jack, a long time friend and business partner who has been working relentlessly on AutoMem (which is opensource and free for anyone to use) It is now the world's best-performing long-term memory system for AI assistants. On November 20, 2025, AutoMem achieved 90.38% accuracy on the LoCoMo benchmark (ACL 2024), beating the previous state-of-the-art by 2.14 points. This is the academic standard for long-term conversational memory. This makes AutoMem the highest-performing memory system in the world, beating: - CORE (heysol.ai): 88.24% (previous SOTA) - OpenAI's baseline: 39% Key breakthroughs: - Multi-hop bridge discovery - Finds connecting memories across conversation threads - Temporal alignment scoring - Understands time-aware queries ("what happened last year?") - 9-component hybrid search - Semantic + lexical + graph + temporal signals - 100% complex reasoning - Perfect score on multi-step reasoning tasks Full benchmark results → Why AutoMem Exists: Your AI forgets everything between sessions. RAG dumps similar documents. Vector databases match keywords but miss meaning. None of them learn. AutoMem gives AI assistants the ability to remember, connect, and evolve their understanding over time—just like human long-term memory. What Makes AutoMem State-of-the-Art AutoMem is a graph-vector memory service built on peer-reviewed neuroscience and validated by academic benchmarks: - Stores memories with metadata, importance scores, temporal context, and semantic embeddings - Recalls via 9-component hybrid search (vector + keyword + graph + temporal + lexical) - Connects memories with 11 typed relationships (RELATES_TO, LEADS_TO, CONTRADICTS, etc.) - Learns through automatic entity extraction, pattern detection, and consolidation cycles - Reasons with multi-hop bridge discovery—finds connecting memories across conversation threads - Performs with sub-100ms recall across thousands of memories AutoMem implements breakthroughs from: HippoRAG 2 (Ohio State, 2025): Graph-vector hybrid matches human associative memory A-MEM (2025): Dynamic memory organization with Zettelkasten-inspired clustering MELODI (DeepMind, 2024): 8x compression without quality loss via gist representations ReadAgent (DeepMind, 2024): 20x context extension through episodic memory Enjoy https://lnkd.in/e4rp88ZG

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At Haggis Studios we’ve been busy giving Bigfoot vs Scots a serious upgrade. This latest wee cheeky video is just a demo of what we have been working on: 🌿 A new procedural foliage system that boosts performance 🌦️ A new weather and lighting system that looks great and keeps frame rates steady 💧 A revamped water system to bring the island to life 🏝️ A brand-new island that expands the world in scale and atmosphere And that’s just the start. Coming over the next few months: ⚔️ A total rework of combat 🎒 A new item inventory system 🗺️ A minimap with quest indicators 🧙 Brand-new quests and characters We’re building the wildest, weirdest island yet, and can’t wait to share more soon.

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I'm excited to officially open spaces for a new consultancy service focused on something many game devs struggle with: Game Feel, Player Feedback, and Communication. https://lnkd.in/ehB7Pdmu Over the years I've seen developers struggling to create the experiences they picture in their head. From student projects, through indie games, and even impacting large studio releases: Otherwise amazing games held back by missing feedback, mismatched UX design, or gameplay that just doesn't convey the experience the developer intended. My aim is to tackle these issues and help every dev create the greatest experiences they can. I've built a set of consulting tiers aimed at helping developers at every stage, tailored to your scope and budget: Tier 1: Student Polish Session Identify missing feedback and clarity that will instantly make your project feel more alive and readable. Tier 2: Indie Quality Review A focused breakdown of where your feedback systems are conveying mixed messages, where your UX is holding you back, and evaluate your projects pacing. Tier 3: Systems & Emotion Deep Dive A full evaluation of how your systems align with game feel, and how you can more impactfully produce the emotional responses you want out of your players. Tier 4: Full Experience Alignment Audit A comprehensive, external audit of player experience, clarity, UX flow, and emotional impact. All consultations involve a vetting step. Before any booking, developers submit a quick form with project details and what they are looking for out of the session. This ensures no money is spent before I know I can be of help to you, and gives me time to prepare the session with the most high-impact changes you can make. If you're building a game and something just doesn't feel right, or you want clearer, more impactful player feedback, this is exactly the service for you. Check out the tiers and how it works at https://lnkd.in/ehB7Pdmu and book your slot now! Let's make your game FEEL great.

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The day in which I share my opinion on how to build IP today in games. Three step process. Don't skip bits. It may take a decade but the reward is worth it. Plus Monty Python in comments. https://lnkd.in/gsJ_tjUB

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