£30m, £247m and a week that changed the tone for UK games

The games sector sees investment from public grant funding and private capital.

As official partners of the London Games Festival, Alliotts Gaming Sector team spent last week criss-crossing London for the 11th London Games Festival and for once the ambient mood around the espresso machines wasn’t “when does this end?” but “right, how do we move?”.

On the Monday, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport put £30 million of new money behind the UK games sector. By the Tuesday, a record £247 million of potential investment was sitting across the tables at Games Finance Market.

For VC-backed studios, that combination matters: it is the first week in a long time where public grant funding, private capital and festival traffic have all pointed in the same direction at the same time.

The backdrop is not gentle. TIGA’s Making Games in the UK 2025 recorded the first drop in development headcount in 14 years, with 206 studios exiting and new-studio formation down to 137, the lowest in a decade and a half.

Against that, a government writing a cheque and an investor room writing term sheets is not a small thing. It’s a window.

The question is whether you’re positioned to use it.

Where we were, and why

Andrew Douthwaite and Sarah Messruther were at the Coutts opening night on the Monday. It is the event where the tone for the week gets set, and this year the tone shifted the moment the £30m landed earlier that day, with hope and optimism that the Government now sees the gaming industry as an area of growth.

Andrew Douthwaite, Alex Poynor, Romesh Albert and Megan Blackmore attended the Games Finance Market days. Thirty-eight publishers and investors in curated meetings, a record £247m of potential deployment in the room, and a level of seriousness in the conversations that we haven’t seen in a couple of years. Alex and Romesh met with many emerging studios on day one, all looking to understand more about the tax reliefs and our view on the funding landscape.

Briony Bradbury, Saphal Gurung, Jing Bi and Anna Farrow covered Screen Play at BFI Southbank. The underlying message from that day is one every VC-backed founder should internalise: your IP may be worth more outside the game than inside it, and that has cap-table implications most term sheets don’t model cleanly.

New Game Plus, the consumer show that moved to Exhibition White City and doubled its floor space this year, was the reminder that UK-made games are still the product people will queue round a building for. Useful context if you are about to raise.

The £30m, decoded for founders

Creative Industries Minister Ian Murray’s £30m splits as £28.5m to the UK Games Fund over three years and £1.5m to Games London. The UKGF money runs on three tracks:

Entry Track:                   Grants up to £20,000 for newly-formed studios.

Emergent Track:            Grants up to £100,000 for prototyping.

Expansion Track:           Grants up to £250,000, the largest UKGF has ever offered, aimed squarely at completion and scale-up.

Applications opened on Tuesday 14 April. For a VC-backed studio, the Expansion Track is the one worth reading twice — it is designed to sit alongside private capital rather than replace it.

The bottom line

The UK games industry spent 2024 and most of 2025 shrinking. Last week it stopped shrinking for long enough to hold a conversation.

£30m of grant, £247m of private capital in one room, a Minister in the building and UK studios still producing the releases that make all of this worth funding.

If you are building a games studio in this country, the next six months are the best shot you have had in three years to land grant money, tax credits and equity in the same financial year.

Do get in touch with our gaming sector team if you would like to talk through VGEC, R&D, UKGF applications or structuring ahead of a round.

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