Paul Durrant
UK Games Fund
Paul is a creative business development specialist with a focus on creating win/win impacts arising from public and private sector collaborations in the digital economy. He’s worked extensively across the skills, talent and research agendas and at the interface of universities and business and contributed to policy and best practice. Paul's projects have helped thousands of individuals and hundreds of small studios across the UK indie games sector and the impacts from subsequent acquisitions and other business development has led to the generation of hundreds of millions of pounds of inward investment for the UK. Paul was awarded an OBE for services to the games industry and to education in the 2022 New Year Honours. In 2015, the UK Games Fund was created as an independent CIC through George Osborne’s March 2015 budget to develop the UK’s games sector, especially at an early stage.
Paul Durrant is speaking at the following session/s
Demystifying Public Funding for Games Studios
There is close to £10,000,000 public funding available between the 4 main speakers at this roundtable, available to UK indepedent games studios. However, not many game studios are aware of this funding, and much of it is, due to the way the funds were set up, complex to access, especially for game developers and founders who may come from underrepresented backgrounds, such as working class, English as second language, education leavers or people with dyslexia. This is before factoring in geographical, business, revenue, team or other requirements.
This roundtable is not only the first time these 4 organisations - the UK Global Screen Fund, Northern Ireland Screen, Creative UK and the UK Games Fund - are in a room together, it's the first time we all sit down together with the games industry, explain the funds we manage in plain language and open the floor to any questions to all of us. We will not only be talking about how to apply for the funds, but also how the funds themselves are formed and what we are looking for, as fund managers.
The purpose of this roundtable is to create a resource for game company founders, owners and indies to feel like they can ask any question and eventually access the pots of public funding that are available to them.
Session Takeaway
- Understand how public funds and grants work compared to equity investment and debt investment
- Learn about the funding criteria of the UK Global Screen Fund, funding from Creative UK, the UK Games Fund and funding from Northern Ireland Screen
- Understand how public funds available to games studios are managed
- Gain insights into how assessing funding applications work
- Be able to create a strategy of which public funds are best to apply to for your studio
- Learn about success cases from the UK games industry
Session speakers
