To wrap up the Game Republic Event at Manchester Metropolitan University on 28th January, Dr Jackie Mulligan, development director of Game Republic hosted a panel of industry experts that included Callum Underwood (IndieBI and Uwu Biz), Des Gayle (Day Off Interactive), Jamie Sefton (Game Republic), Becky Attard (BOOST), and Stuart Dinsey (Curve Games). The event formed part of Game Republic’s events and activities for 2026 supported by Official Partners Red Kite Games, Xsolla and Double Eleven.
Gerald Allen Antoine, a student studying for his MSc Computer Games Development at Manchester Metropolitan University neatly captured some of the answers to the key questions Jackie raised on the day.
What can game developers do to try to mitigate the turbulence in the games industry?
Callum emphasised the importance of maintaining funds in different currencies, saying “I try not to keep all of the money we get from games we sell in dollars even though most of the money comes in in dollars… I try to make sure we have enough pound sterling and other currencies to pay the next year or so for whoever we have got in those territories and to keep dollars for where we want to spend dollars.”
Stuart advised the developers that “if you focus on your game, you do the right things, you’re careful with your costs, you plan your cash flow—particularly plan your cash flow—you should be able to ride out any wobbles from elsewhere.”
Jackie raised that beyond the economics, what could studios do to mitigate the team impact of living in turbulent times, referencing the news in January as an example that could impact someone’s mental health and asked the panelists what studios could do to reduce the impact.
Stuart responded to this question first, saying “the most important part of being an employer is to show protection. That’s your job as a leader. So you have to find out the people who are worrying about it and if they are worrying about it you talk to them.”
Callum recounted several instances at IndieBI where they had to extract employees from conflict zones “we used to joke in the past that we needed an extraction fund. It got kind of real when you’ve got global employees all around the world to actually support them both mentally but also with finances and support and help them get relocated.”
What areas of VC investment in games are particularly hot?
Callum told the audience that investors “are looking for smaller teams. People are looking for people who can ship fast.”
Callum explained the practice of investing into a game to get it to a vertical slice that can then be taken to publishers does not really exist anymore. While it was a popular practice during COVID, the result was that numerous developers got to vertical slices at the same time meaning publishers were unable to fund all of them. Callum said the outcome of this is “we’ll see a lot of games launching that are somewhat unfinished because they’ve run out of money and they need to launch.”
Stuart described Callum’s concept as Fast Dev. He said “In terms of working in the current environment, one of the things I think we’re going to hear more and more of—and Devolver kind of went public with it—is this idea of Fast Dev and lower budgets. We’ve been talking about it for a while, but Fast Dev is going to become a term. From a publisher’s perspective you’re going to hear—in the way that you all got used to hearing ‘yeah, but have you got a build?’ whereas it used to be ‘have you got a game design document?’–‘can you do Fast Dev? Can you bring us a game that will come out between twelve and eighteen months? And can you make sure it’s 100% definitely lower than five hundred thousand dollars dev spend?’. If you’re thinking ‘I’m going to bring a game to publishers that takes two to three years and costs two to three million,’ it’s going to be really difficult.”
Jamie shared that publishers are trying to do more with less “VC investment has really shrunk back… It used to be the case where you could go and just get a publisher to fund something from sort of a million pounds upwards. It’s now 500k and kind of that sort of figure upwards.” Jamie highlighted that one of the biggest challenges developers will face is getting noticed … “there’s so many games out there so you really have got to do a lot of work to build communities and do a lot of work that Becky talked about…Publishers are looking for traction. They’re looking for people playing your game. Not necessarily like 10,000 wishlists or anything like that. They’re more interested in active engagement with you, even it’s a couple hundred people.”
Becky added to the discussion saying that “the market validation thing has become absolutely key…it’s now not just about wishlists…it’s more about the validation that your game is going to be relevant and has an audience. Doing that research yourself—looking into who your audience is, what the competitors are out there—is going to be really important as well to kind of have that validation. We’re finding some games are probably announcing too early because they have been asked to put themselves out there to be able to get that validation. You really have to think about when you need that investment, what kind of investment you need, and make sure that it’s not going to harm your campaign because you’re releasing something too early just to try to get that investment. It’s almost going to become a balancing act really.”
Des took a different angle referring to Chris Dring’s The Game Business presentation “I want to touch on something that Chris mentioned in his talk about niches…The niche isn’t only about the audience. It’s about the publishers as well. There’s a lot of publishers that are like ‘we’re doing this, so if you’re making this, bring us this,’ and we did that and we got funding, and it was—I’m not going to say it was easy, it was still difficult—the conversation was easier.”
Des added that diversifying funds was important stating “I think you need to kind of like diversify your money as well. Not just when you have it, but beforehand. Like we got [our funding] through different sources. We got one publisher, and we have also got some angels as well.”
Are the changes in game publishing?
Callum shared that smaller and faster teams will have a lot of options available to them. He explained that “the diversity of funding sources and types of publishers have never been greater…Having the option have a Curve or a Raw Fury or a Humble or whatever is great, but I think having the options of all of these micro-publishers is also good…We’re seeing a lot of that with games sometimes costing less to make and there’s more sources of money. If you need a couple million dollars your options are very limited…If you want lower and you can ship faster there are many more places to get money right now.”
Des added that exploring these opportunities are a lot better now too, explaining that “COVID did a good job of opening up the world for us in terms of getting in contact with people.”
What are the ways to improve game discoverability in 2026?
Becky led the discussion on this topic, stating “It depends obviously [on] who is your audience. So if you’re trying to contact publishers and investors and everything like that I mean you do still need to have a strong, solid pitch…I’ve looked through a lot of pitches and I’ve seen people can’t even really necessarily explain their game or what they’re showing. That’s where the comms side becomes quite important because it’s both how you’re pitching to people as well as how you’re talking publicly. [Discoverability is] very much about starting off small…You need that small, tight fanbase to be able to understand that your game is working. ”
Becky added “The hardest thing to hear from a developer as well is that if you’ve put a game out there and the feedback isn’t necessarily positive you do need to take that on board…You just have to be realistic as well in starting off small and looking out for those audiences that you want to contact is going to be quite important there. And then grow from there. If you get traction, [if] you get good feedback, that’s when you can start looking at how you can kind of expand or not.”
Jamie encouraged developers to draw on Des’ points as targeting niche audiences was a good way to improve discoverability and pointed to Alex Johansson’s game Morse and how the developer was taking the game to amateur radio enthusiast events to draw in players as an example, saying ”he’s really leaned into the kind of niche thing and really gone for that and that’s worked really well.”
Callum advised developers they needed to understand what it is they want from a publisher, be it funding, publishing, or some amount of both. He said, “I think that it’s totally fine to say you want a publisher to publish your game as opposed to you just need funding, and it’s often mixed between the two.”
What are the growing markets for games?
First to speak on this was Des who said, “we’re looking at Africa…the growth opportunity in PC there is off the charts.” He also advised developers that “you need to be thinking what the market is now and what it could be. I still think we haven’t explored [Brazil, India, China] fully.” He finished his thoughts by describing the importance of China in the market, stating “if you are not localizing into any of the Chinese languages then you are absolutely shooting yourself in the foot.”
Stuart followed up on Des’ thoughts about China. He said “if you’re talking about Steam, China is still absolutely huge… We absolutely focus on whether a game will resonate [with] the Chinese consumer. Now that doesn’t mean we won’t sign games that don’t, but it goes past two different evaluation teams because it gives us such an opportunity.” He also mentioned the importance of mobile in India and Africa.
Des added to this conversation by advising companies partner with local people / companies in various markets, “boots on the ground knowledge is invaluable.”
What will the Work for Hire market in games look like in 2026?
Callum began conversation on this topic by advocating strongly for local companies. He said “I like working with local companies for multiple reasons. One, I’ve bumped into about three people here that I’ve worked with or talked about working with already. Two, they’re always on your time zone. I think America as a co-dev for European companies is pretty dead now due to costs ultimately.”
What is the one thing that game developers can do this year to give them the best opportunities for their businesses to succeed and thrive?
Jamie reminded everyone of the benefits of networking, saying “networking is just really important. Come to these events, network, ask ourselves Game Republic for help with connections and stuff because it’s those things that can really help you in the tough times that we’ve had over the past couple of years.”
Becky talked about the importance of diversifying investments. She advised the audience to “look into different areas for how you can get investments. Like, even us as agencies are looking into potential rev-share options now. It’s changing the whole market. It’s not about having retainers, getting companies on board, and paying loads of money. There are ways that you can work with companies that is on a rev-share basis. You don’t just have to go to big publishers. You can look at getting different disciplines for that kind of options. Diversify how you’re looking at how you can potentially work with agencies, partners, publishers.”
Stuart stressed the importance of learning from the success of others, saying “don’t be afraid to steal other people’s ideas. That can mean in how you go to market as well. Find out more about what the smaller companies have done and how they were smart. Read the newsletters, follow the tools—GameDiscover and SteamDB—and understand what’s going on out there at the level that affects you, rather than the top line.”
Callum’s advice was short and to the point: “Don’t make it a single player VR game.”
Des’ guidance was to “get creative about where your game could be. You might think you want to make this specific-type thing, but I would look at TV/film IP holders who are desperate to get some of this sexy video game stuff. Just think about how what you’re already building could complement what they’ve got and that’s a nice conversation to have.”
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