Game Republic partnered with EGX and GamesIndustry.biz at MCM Comic-Con at ExCeL in London on Friday 24th October 2025, to curate the content for a very special Investment Summit, focused on bringing publishers, investors and game developers together for talks, panels and meetings.
The full day event included a fireside chat featuring editor-in-chief of The Game Business, Chris Dring, interviewing industry legend Peter Moore, former ex-head of SEGA, Xbox and EA Sports as well as most recently, CEO of Liverpool FC. In a talk that also touched upon his new autobiography Game Changer, Moore discussed his time at SEGA launching the Dreamcast console and the difficult decision for SEGA to leave the hardware business, the successful launch of the Xbox 360 and moving back to the UK to become the CEO of his childhood football club, Liverpool FC (see below for more info and quotes from the session).
The Peter Moore interview was followed by an overview of public funding opportunities by Emma Cooper from Innovate UK, a fireside chat with founder of angel investment group PlayCap, Bibbi Wikman, a panel on publishing and investment led by GI.Biz editor Lewis Packwood with Meg Clarke (Team17), Simon Byron (Yogscast Games) Lirui Ding (Transcend Fund) and Cassia Curran (Curran agency). After lunch, the Investment Summit moved onto a talk from James Batchelor from Digital Bandidos on how to attract the right kind of attention from the media, a fireside chat on pitching and pitch decks by James Schall, Secret Mode and a final session from Chris Filip (Global Screen Fund) and Anna Mansi (BFI) on funding and the VGEC tax breaks for games companies.
Below, we summarise some of the insights from each chat, which were jam-packed full of great and honest tips for developers. The full interview with Peter Moore will be presented soon by The Game Business as a video podcast, so subscribe to hear the whole lot. An article covering the publishing and investment panel hosted by Lewis Packwood will also soon be published on gamesindustry.biz
Lessons Learned from Video Games – Peter Moore
The interview with Peter Moore covered much territory from his recent book Game Changer. From a serendipitous interaction with Yoko Ono in Japan when attending a SEGA meeting, to asking Steve Ballmer, CEO at Microsoft for over £1bn to rescue the Xbox 360 from the “Red Ring of Death”; from launching Dreamcast to being offered the Liverpool FC job and the full circle moment for him, having grown up in Liverpool and watching the matches. One of the key insights came in one of the final questions where Chris Dring asked him what he had been able to bring from video games to managing Liverpool FC.
Peter Moore replied:
“I took the lesson to engage with gamers to football fans. Like gamers, they are volatile and it doesn’t work to be cold and distant. It’s important to put the gamer at the centre of it all – in this case I applied that to fans.”
Peter also shared much of the tech he developed at the club was inspired by his time at EA Sports developing tech such as EA Connect and microtransactions, working with the fan base and creating online social areas. At the end of the interview, Stuart Dinsey from Curve Games asked how he had dealt with leaving Liverpool FC. Very poignantly and honestly, Peter shared his sadness at seeing his Director’s seat empty when he watched it on TV, now he has returned back to the USA. Every answer in the interview showed Peter’s incredible passion to put everything into his projects, and the interview is well worth a watch – a true industry legend.
Funding Opportunities for Game Developers
Emma Cooper admitted how hard it was to follow the session, but nevertheless managed to provide a great overview of investment opportunities, the context of a Government that has put games into the industrial strategy and the significance of that move, the creative places growth fund and regional implications.
Emma’s key insight was that “We won’t fund the game but we will invest in software tech, AI etc. development hardware – we would fund that.” Emma also shares a creative industries investment database which you can access here https://iuk-business-connect.org.uk/creative-industries-investor-database/
Angel Investors for Video Games
Next up Jamie Sefton, MD of Game Republic did a fireside chat with Bibbi Wikman, Playcap. Bibbi has founded a network of female angel investors with investments typically being upwards of £50k. When asked by Jamie about what her investment fund looks at – Bibbi said, “As an angel, connection with the people, the team is important. The people need to be transparent, to understand the obstacles and we need to have confidence that this is a team that can reshape and adapt as needed.” Jamie asked why angels would be a good choice for game developers – Bibbi explained that the good thing about angels is that they have a network and expertise and want to help the developers. Refreshingly she added that diversity in founding teams was a good thing “when you have diversity in your founding teams, there is a better return on your investments.”
Investment for game developers – GamesIndustry.biz Panel
After a short break, attendees were treated to a wealth of insights from a panel of publishers and investors led by the affable Lewis Packwood from GamesIndustry.biz. His opening gambit ‘So where has all the money gone?’ was a fantastic start that led to quite wide-ranging answers mostly centred on the fact that ‘it hasn’t gone but delete as appropriate – it’s been reallocated, distributed differently, diversified, has changed to smaller amounts and is tougher to secure.
Lirui Ding from VC investors Transcend Fund suggested that there were two trends impacting investment:
“I think because of all the things happened during Covid, there were a lot of investors who don’t really know the games industry and maybe had just seen their kids play games. So a bit of that money, I think it disappeared, because they didn’t know how to invest – they were “fair weather investors”. Some of that investment and money disappeared. I think that’s one part. The second part is the money is flowing or moving a lot more from the US gradually to Europe for the last few years, but then from last year, a lot of money is going from US and Europe to other emerging markets like China, Turkey, or Vietnam – low cost countries.
Meg Clarke from Team17 believed money was there, but not where it used to be too, so it was largely funding smaller projects and going to smaller territories where development was more affordable – so it was about redistribution and diversification.
“Obviously, you’ve already touched upon going to different territories, different types of investors. I would say there’s a band of funding that has definitely dried up, and that is those higher-budget kind of triple A games. But the great thing about the game industry is it’s incredibly resilient and a lot of those people that have been laid off after Covid and things like that, they’ve started new ventures, they’ve been able to raise capital. There’s loads of little boutique publishers popping up, loads of funds for much smaller projects, granted, but I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. I mean, there’s a lot of money there that can be invested into grassroots projects and into smaller companies.”
Like Cassia Curran from Curran Games Agency, Meg described another issue being “the endless more of content”
Cassia described a potential saturated market, where the Covid bubble of in-home entertainment had created so much more of everything and games needed to compete in that more competitive landscape. Interestingly pointing out that new games are also competing against old games too.
Simon Byron from Yogscast Games bemoaned the fact that we had been promised “survive ’til 2025″ and we are here but it is still challenging. He reassured the audience that “publishers still need to publish”. He highlighted how Yogscast Games typically works with smaller teams and that bigger companies were not faring so well in a market which is now more about being agile and nimble. He admitted that the consideration of where you are going to put money is more tricky.
“It is pretty tricky, you know, we’ll been talking already on the roundtables about problems with discoverability and all that sort of stuff. The money’s still there, right? Publishers need to publish, so there is there is money there. I think the real challenge is that everything has shifted. If you look at the people that are doing well now, they’re not the people that were doing quite so well, two years ago, five years ago, and those foundations of the bigger companies were built on are being eroded. I think you’re seeing companies coming in, finding success by being more agile, being more nimble. And sort of just rolling their sleeves up, really. We delight in seeing these games pop off on steam at the moment, and often they come from the people you’ve never heard of.”
Genres of games securing publishers and investment
Lewis then pressed the publishers and investors on particular genres or attributes
Meg Clarke advocated any genre.
“I listened to a podcast where Willem Dafoe and he said something that I keep reusing, which is, “do the thing, to do the thing”. Don’t do things to please other people, because if they don’t like it, you’re making something that you hate. So if you make something that you enjoy that’s inspired by things that you get good vibes from, and you’ve played it and it’s fun, that’s the best art. Don’t just be like, I’m doing this genre because on Steam, it tells me that this genre is right because people change, trends change. And you will be doing something that everyone’s doing and you don’t stand out. Some people see success from genre chasing, but it really depends how agile you can be how innovative you can be. You might not get investment and you might still want to make the thing – and this is where we’re seeing a lot of the success stories in self-publishing. If you do end up in a space where you’re being self-published and it’s got a lot of passion and feeling behind it, then it’s more likely to be successful. So I would always say, don’t make something for me, make something because you want to make it, and if it feels good and if it’s the right fit for that publisher, it will happen.”
Cassia Curran believed that a very specific opportunity was on Free To Play in VR.
“Just in the last 12 months, there’s a new free to play game that’s coming out and doing well. And the top title is making about $4 million dollars a month.. Animal Company. I just published a report on this: https://www.curran.games/2025-f2p-vr-market-report.”
Lewis reminded the audience that GI.Biz had done a feature on VR natives, showing a new demographic playing VR games: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/meet-vr-natives-the-new-key-demographic-for-virtual-reality
Cassia added “Exactly – there’s basically children and really young people who after school, they go home and they are jumping into Animal Company, they’re jumping into Yeeps, like Ruffnauts and they’re all using the Gorilla Tag locomotion – they’re all action games, all highly social. It’s like Ruffnauts is basically Pokemon Go – 20% of the titles on the Meta Quest store right now have animal words in them. So, yeah, this is like a very specific niche trend opportunity that will close.”
Simon emphasised the uniqueness of Yogscast Games because it has the publisher and content creator arms so they would look for games that their creators like. He added “But there are there’s certainly no shortage of pitches out there, you know, all manner of budgets, etc. There’s definitely funding for you. The question that you need to ask yourself is the right type of funding and the word that we that we keep going back to, is like, find a publisher who loves you.”
“As an example last year or so was we saw a prototype of a Blackjack roguelike – this was before Balatro actually and we loved it. We played it and it was using sort of programmer art, etc, and we thought there’s something here. And we went out of our way because we loved the mechanic and no-one was doing anything like this at the time. and to work very closely with the devs. Because making games is you’re making what you want to make. There’s a lot of boring stuff that goes on behind the scenes, which is where a publisher can really show value. Another thing that has changed is that there used to be rivalry between publishers but now we work together. So best piece of advice is to find somebody that loves you as much as you love your game.”
Lirui Ding of Transcend Fund said that their investors had a high tolerance to risk, and invest in games across all genres and are open to established studios as well as new ones, “ as a games-focused fund, we have a lot of flexibility. So I can give you two examples. One example is we have a studio called Midsummer, and they are building an AI-native game – it’s a next generation life simulation game that people have never ever seen before, and it took us a while to understand what the game is about…It’s an interactive experience. If you play the game for 30 minutes, you will get it. Every time is a new experience. So that’s one category. Another category is the other end of the spectrum, we have another portfolio company called Ruckus Games (ex-Gearbox) making a shooter.”
The Future of Funding for Game Developers
Lewis asked about the future of funding and what looks like.
Meg Clarke said, “It’s really encouraging to see a lot of developers reinvesting in the industry – we’re seeing a lot of funds and publishers crop up. I think that’s a really encouraging sign – that the money is not being taken away from games and instead pointed to other places. People are coming together to try and appeal for more money, from different bodies and things like that. I think we need to remember that spirit and we need to come together in the greater interest of the games industry because, you know, as Cassia said, like, we’re not just competing with each other, we’re competing with film, television, TikTok, ads, like, all of this stuff.“
She added “There are a lot of prototype funds appearing, especially regional ones across the world, like marginalised developer ones, things like that. But as developers, you really need to like bring those starting costs down to as low as you can, whilst you can, and then obviously, let your ambition get a little bit more wild in your production plan. But getting that prototype together is what’s going to sustain the interest of investors, in my opinion. This is a model that favours smaller and smaller teams. There was this bubble of really high investment, really large teams that unfortunately just did not pay off. The sales weren’t there to support that model. But we are seeing loads of success of loads of micro-teams and like, really innovative, fun, exciting ideas. So, yeah, be one of those if you can!“
Cassia explained, “You are seeing a great government investment, which is fantastic, and I would say to developers, first of all, please develop games because you are passionate about making games – there are so much easier ways to make money! And then also think about, making games that can get an audience and hopefully be successful, but don’t require that much money to make. The major thing that people have to solve is the cutting through the noise.”
Simon encouraged developers to be clearer in the ask: “I think I would just underscore to developers to work out what exactly it is that you’re looking for. I think publishers are simple creatures – they want to know what the game is going to be like, how much it is going to cost, when is it going to arrive. So often I’ll start conversations with people going, “Yeah, I’m making this game and I want a million for it, or 50k! Work out what it is that you need and ask for it and just be clear about it. And I think try to remove uncertainty, because there’s so much other uncertainty elsewhere – you want to remove that uncertainty. Give them the confidence you’re going to be able to deliver what you’re talking about, what you say that you’re going to be able to do and when you’re going to do it and we can work from there. But going back to my earlier point publishers need games to publish, so there are opportunities out there. Make the game you want to make and make sure it is fun for you. If it is fun for you, it should be fun for others too.”
Lirui said “I’m optimistic about the audience of the future – there are 3.5-4 billion gamers at the moment and that will double in the future. Kids play games and play videogames with friends. I continue to play videogames!”
For a rundown of the full panel and other key insights from the event, visit gamesindustry.biz.
Getting your game into the media – insights from Digital Bandidos
The next session featured James Batchelor from Digital Bandidos who provided a detailed insight into how to get your games into the games media and crucially what not to do. The overview was packed full of practical tips and here are just a few stand-out items.
– Look for champions – that could be press, influencers, players and publishers who will help draw attention to your game
– TLDR (too long don’t read) emails to be avoided. Paste in press releases to emails. Consider unique features that are genuinely unique as every game will claim ‘stunning visuals.
– Don’t spam, or chase up too often – appreciate journalists have hundreds of emails a day. Get to the point, share why you are doing the game and consider smaller outlets and international ones. Embargo if possible to give journalists time to prepare a story.
– Expect rejection or silence and only do one or maybe two follow-ups and then let it lie.
– Get a hook into the subject line
Publisher insights for game developers with Secret Mode
Next up, the audience were treated to a fireside chat with Jamie Sefton, MD of Game Republic and James Schall, Director of Publishing at Secret Mode. The key highlight from the session was James highlighting “Games with a soul and a reason to exist succeed because they have authenticity. We have a wide range of games and they all have a soul.” He emphasised that why the game exists was often missing from pitch decks and shared the story of the origin of A Little To The Left as an example of an incredible and emotional back story that explained its existence linked to bereavement and wanting to put life back into order.
His tips for pitching to Secret Mode included – “give us an idea of emotion in the game and the end result for the player. The game world is not important immediately so you don’t need to share that with the publisher first – focus on the concept, game, how much it costs and how you can deliver it.”
He also shared that it is okay to use AI to demonstrate your idea as it can help to show concepts quickly but then not to use it for the finished artwork. AI was a useful tool to speed up the communication of concepts. He emphasised that publishers help to maximise the opportunity but that it still needs luck and also highlighted that traction was not as important as sentiment and that Secret Mode placed emphasis on the level of engagement and emotional response to the game over numbers. “If you see a wishlist of 100,000 and 1 comment you know the sentiment isn’t there.”
Global Screen Fund and Tax Credits for Game Studios from BFI
The final session was from Chris Filip and Anna Mansi at the BFI. Chris highlighted that the UK Global Screen Fund would not fund games but would fund marketing, localisation and people to support game studios.
He highlighted that it was important to ‘frame your ask’ to be successful and that there were many different funds. Key requirements would be to prove you can run a business, registered in the UK. Anna Mansi focused on the tax relief and the new VGEC tax credits. As games change, a key element is that there must be a level of interactivity and a UK games company. Both Anna and Chris urged game developers to get in touch with them with any questions – visit https://www.bfi.org.uk/funding-industry
Legal and Financial Support for Game Developers
Following questions from attendees about the importance of specialist service provides, Jackie Mulligan from Game Republic highlighted that games-focused solicitors like Eaton Smith Solicitors and Lewis Silkin could really help game developers in all aspects of contracting, investment and more and for finance advice- it was good to use specialists, game developers should contact trusted providers in the Game Republic like Plus Accounting or Johnston Carmichael.
Party Time
Once finished, attendees headed to the buzzing Waterfront bar for industry networking, food and drinks until late – very few shots of this one sadly as it was such a lot of fun that the lens got blurry – altogether the Investment Summit was a must-attend free event at MCM/EGX. Roll on next year!
To find out about this event and other Game Republic partnered events, and Game Republic events, follow Game Republic on LinkedIn or apply to join the network on gamerepublic.net/join-us
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