In an interview with Game Developer, María Sayans, President of Ukie, the British gaming trade agency, and Chief Executive Officer of the Memorial Valley studio Ustwo Game, stressed that it was becoming increasingly unrealistic for small studios to retain long-term staff.
According to María Sayans, the studio has been producing games costing between Pound7 million and Pound10 million for about three to four years. Noting that “we need to save costs” that the Ustwo Gomes studio currently has less than 30 employees (a peak of 40 during the development of Monument Valley 3) she suggested that the studio should not employ so many full-time staff and should choose more outsourcing contracts to ensure that long-term commitments are reduced. María Sayans said: “We are a little too ideal about hiring employees and providing long-term job security. We have been caught in a situation where outsourcing has been relatively low in our staff base at the peak of the production of Memorial Valley 3. I think this is what we want to change in the future.” María Sayans suggests that the studio may hire more outsourced workers in the future, not because of what she wants, but the industry is now moving in that direction. “I think that in the future we will have a core team, and that any growth will be achieved through outsourcing, which I hate,” she said.
“It has been 20 years since I entered the profession, and we have had a good time at the beginning of the twenty-first century. You certainly want the studio to provide that stability, but I think it represents a shift in the way we work together as future practitioners.” According to Sayans, by employing additional outsourced teams and collaborative development teams, the studio can maintain stability in budget and cash reserves. The Ustwo Games studio recently announced that it was moving from a mobile to a PC-based studio, which they considered no longer had “a solid basis for building long-term operations”. Founded in 1989, Ukie is the leading industry association in the British game industry, representing more than 2,000 play enterprises and supporting 73,000 jobs in the UK.
Last year, Ukie reported that “there are currently 26,000 players in the game industry in the United Kingdom, compared to an average of 2,000 in Europe” and that “the average contribution of every British practitioner to the British economy is £113,000, almost twice the national average”. A report on employee welfare issued by Ukie in 2024 states that, despite economic pressure, the game industry is “working to provide support to employees”. The report adds: “As the industry develops, the opportunity lies in creating welfare programmes that retain talent and that truly enrich working life.” “through better communication tools, improved staff feedback processes and sustained attention to long-term well-being, the industry can set the bar for the wider creative industry.”
