The Sunday Times February 6, 2022 5BUSINESS
M
iles Jacobson stumbled
into the games industry
by chance. As a music
promoter on a small sal-
ary during the Britpop
boom of the 1990s, he
would often swap gig tick-
ets for video games.
Once, he offered tick-
ets for a Blur concert —
the band was represented by his com-
pany, Food Records — to staff at Domark,
makers of the Championship Manager
game. In return, he received a free tester
copy of the second version of the hit
game. He had been a fan of the first but
had an eye for detail and would fax
glitches he had spotted to Paul and Oliver
Collyer, the brothers who invented it.
He went on to work for them.
“I’ve managed to merge all of my hob-
bies into my work, so it doesn’t feel like
work at all,” said Jacobson, 50, who now
runs the Sega-owned Sports Interactive.
But video games are no hobby.
This is a £200 billion-a-year industry
now at the centre of a global deals spree,
as some of the world’s biggest companies
pay megabucks for games developers.
Last week, Sony agreed to pay $3.6 bil-
lion (£2.6 billion) for Destiny creator
Bungie.
That purchase came hot on the heels
of Xbox maker Microsoft’s $69 billion
takeover of Activision Blizzard, the giant
behind Call of Duty, and Take-Two Inter-
active’s $13 billion deal to buy FarmVille
developer Zynga and bring it into the
same stable as Grand Theft Auto.
The feeding frenzy has crossed theAtlantic. In the UK, China’s Tencent has
just wrapped up its £920 million pur-
chase of Sheffield-based Sumo Group,
while last year US giant EA spent similar
sums on Warwickshire-based Codemas-
ters and Cheshire’s Playdemic, which it
bought from Warner Bros. Also last year,
Fortnite creator Epic Games gobbled up
Mediatonic, the London-based devel-
oper of Fall Guys.
Dominic Wheatley, one of the
co-founders of Domark — which became
Eidos and went on to create Tomb Raider
— believes the industry is now more
attractive to investors because of the shift
from physical sales to digital downloads.
In the past, it would take months to
receive the money when a shop sold one
of your discs. “The cashflow was terri-
ble,” said Wheatley. Online, you get the
money instantly.
Spurred on by global lockdowns, the
industry has ballooned and is expected
to top £200 billion this year, said the pro-
fessional services firm Deloitte. That
compares with £115 billion for the pay-TV
industry and £35 billion for cinema.
However, there are concerns about a
shortage of talent throttling the growth of
the UK industry. Programmers can com-
mand huge salaries in the US; British stu-
dios have spoken of struggling to com-
pete with such high paycheques.
Sir Ian Livingstone, the Games Work-
shop founder, is concerned that British
studios receive a takeover offer from
overseas buyers and take the money and
run instead of growing into giants, as hap-
pens in the US and Asia. Livingstone, who
was chairman of Sumo before its sale to
Tencent, said: “The challenge is to realise
greater value for the people who create
the content, rather than selling out early
doors because they can’t get project
finance or equity finance.”
Livingstone said the video games
industry was still “invisible”, adding:
“Nobody knows who makes the games.”
So who are these British brains behind
some of the world’s most popular titles?Britain has the best video game talent but
US and Asian giants are snapping it all upWhy do our
games stars
sell so soon?
JAMIE
NIMMODEBBIE BESTWICK
When she was about to start
her A-levels, Debbie
Bestwick got a job in a
games shop in her
home city of
Nottingham to help
her single mother
pay the rent.
Bestwick, instantly
recognisable for her
purple hair, decided
not to go back to
school and started
building her empire.She negotiated the sale of
the shop to a bigger chain
that also owned a video
games publisher. Bestwick,
now 51, switched to the
development side, which
became Team17, and was
made marketing and sales
chief before she was 20.
In 1995, Team17 launched
Worms, in which bazooka-
wielding worms fired an
array of missiles, grenades,
and even sheep and skunks
at one another. It earned a
cult status that has
endured over the years
thanks to new versions of
the game.
In 2018, Bestwick led
the Wakefield-based
Team17 on to the stock
market — and has not
looked back.
Bestwick, who is a
Nottingham Forest fan, sold
shares in the company for
£27 million when Team 17
floated, but clung on to
much of her stake. With the
shares up 330 per cent
since the listing, her
20 per cent holding is
now worth about
£210 million.SAM AND
DAN HOUSER
The sons of the Get Carter
actress Geraldine Moffat,
London-born brothers Sam
and Dan Houser are behind
the most successful
entertainment product of all
time: Grand Theft Auto.
The pair were co-founders
of Rockstar Games, formed
as part of Take-Two
Interactive, which in 1998
acquired BMG’s video
publishing assets, including
Grand Theft Auto. The action-
adventure game was
originally created in Dundee
by DMA Design, which
became Rockstar North.
The Housers, along with
the third co-founder Jamie
King, relocated to New
York as part of the shake-
up and grew Rockstar
into a global success
story, moving its star
title into 3D in 2001.
Under the guidance
of Sam Houser, 50,
Grand Theft Auto
attracted controversy for
its gore and violence. In an
interview in 2001, he
responded: “There is nothing
in the game more or less
violent than an episode of
The Sopranos, but because it
is a video game, people react
differently. Not sure why ...”
Despite the criticism, the
series took off. In 2018, a
report by MarketWatch
named Grand Theft Auto V as
the most successful media
title ever (including games,
films, movies and books),
having sold 90 million-plus
copies and generated more
than $6 billion in revenue
since its launch five years
earlier (it has now sold more
than 155 million copies).
The spoils of the brothers’
success are obvious. Since
leaving Rockstar in 2020,
Dan Houser, 48, who went to
Oxford University, has
splashed out $16.5 million on
a mansion in Brentwood, the
celebrity-packed pocket of
Los Angeles, next to British
heiress Petra Ecclestone and
opposite basketball
superstar LeBron James. He
also owns a $12.5 million
mansion in Brooklyn, New
York, where one former
owner, the author Truman
Capote, is believed to have
written Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Sam Houser still runs
Rockstar.DAVID BRABEN
David Braben began coding
video games at Cambridge
University, where he was
studying natural sciences. “I
did enough of that and then I
was programming, trying to
fit in going out to the bar or
whatever in between,”
Braben, now 58, explained.
“It was great fun, though.
A lot of my colleagues were
also interested in the whole
computer side of things, as
well as drinking in the bar.”
Braben had grown
frustrated that many of the
games out there — including
Defender, a sci-fi shooter
game developed by Williams
Electronics — were “samey”,
with similar time limits,
scoring systems and playing
styles. So in 1984, he and his
friend Ian Bell created Elite,
where players could pilot a
spaceship between star
systems, trading and
exploring as they went. It
became a huge hit when
released for two early
computers, the BBC Micro
and the Acorn Electron.
In 1994, he formed his
company FrontierDevelopments, which in
2014 was behind the
updated, graphically far
more advanced Elite
Dangerous spaceflight
game. More recently, it
has produced the Jurassic
World series of titles.
The company floated on
London’s junior market in
2013 at 127p per share and is
now trading at £13.70,
having received backing
from Tencent.
Despite the shares
halving over the past year
amid concerns
about tech
stocks,
Braben’s
33 per cent
stake,
which he
owns with
his wife
Wendy, is still
worth about
£180 million.£210m
Debbie Bestwick’s stake in
Worms developer Team17£180m
David Braben’s wealth from
the Jurassic World studio£310m
Houser brothers’ wealth
from Grand Theft AutoILLUSTRATION: JAMES COWEN