Three gaming companies from Dundee have landed a share of a £4m fund aimed at boosting the prospects of businesses in the industry.
Ruffian Games, Biome Collective, and StormCloud games will receive grants of up to £25,000 from the UK Government’s UK Games Fund.
The fund will run until 2019 and provides grants to support video games projects, create jobs and help develop new talent.
The city is the only place in the UK where more than one company received a share of the UK Gaming Fund grant in what is the third year of the scheme.
Frank Arnot, managing director at Stormcloud Games, said the grants proved the city’s ambition in the industry and that he is “delighted” the company won the funds.
He said: “Funding for the creative industries is incredibly scarce, as can be witnessed by the vastly oversubscribed applications to the fund, therefore to be selected as one of the successful applicants is validation of Stormcloud as a business.
“The latest funding round is also further measure of validation of the creative talent and ambition of Dundee’s games sector, with three of the winning companies based in the city.”
Dundee has fast become one of the UK’s main hubs for game development after the city gave birth to two international hits in Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto.
This led to Abertay University becoming the first university in the world to offer a course in software engineering for video games in 1996.
Ruffian Games, which was formed in 2008, have a small six man prototype team working on a new VR game called Bad TV that the company is funding themselves.
Creative director, Billy Thomson said the additional funding would help “polish” the company’s game.
He said: “As all indie developers know, the budget is always extremely tight, so this additional funding from the UK Games Fund will allow us to add more content and apply more polish to the game than our budget would have allowed.
“The net effect of the funding for us will be a more content rich and refined game, which will be a more appealing prospect to the game players we’re targeting.”
Biome Collective director, Malath Abbas, added: “The fund will help us create a playable prototype of our game, Garden, to open up commercial and publishing partnerships to get the game to market.”
Meanwhile, an Abertay University computer games course that ranked in the Princeton Review’s global top ten is included in a BAFTA scholarship programme on offer in the UK, China and Hong Kong.
Designers and programmers from across the globe are part of a star-studded line-up for the free event on Saturday May 6, celebrating two decades of games education at Abertay.
Held during Abertay Digital Graduate Show – which runs from May 5-9 – the session is being organised by Creative Dundee and all speakers are graduates of the University who have gone on to influence the games industry.
