Levelling up: the growth of the UK video game space

Evolution: Growth

Industries: Video games

Founded in 2008 by a group of four friends, Sean Murray, Ryan Doyle, David Ream, and Grant Duncan, Guildford- and Cambridge-based Hello Games is the creator of multimillion selling Joe Danger and one of the biggest selling new IPs in video games with No Man’s Sky. The founder team had worked together as developers previously with teams including Criterion, Sumo Digital, and Kuju Entertainment. Their desire, born from witnessing games becoming more serious and missing the vibrancy that came from their childhood games, was to insert fun back into games while also developing deep gameplay and ensuring high quality.

In the present, Hello Games are trying to combine the stability and quality of AAA development with the freedom and creativity that come with being an independent studio to create new games that would otherwise not exist. We explore their portfolio of games below:

• Joe Danger is the first game developed by Hello Games that has players controlling Joe Danger, a daredevil, in a side-scrolling video game where they have to navigate time-limited course and complete enough objectives in order to advance to the next level. Since its release in 2010, various versions and sequels have been released, including:
  • Released on Xbox Live Arcade, Joe Danger Special Edition has double the game play time with all new challenges, gameplay modes, and new playable characters to unlock.
  • Joe Danger 2: The Movie follows on from where the previous game left off with Joe Danger now in Hollywood, on the set of an action film.
  • Joe Danger Touch is made for mobile and tablets, featuring a whole new adventure and entirely unique mechanics.
  • Joe Danger PC brings Joe Danger and Joe Danger 2: The Movie to Steam through Steam Workshop support for level sharing, mouse and keyboard controls, Steam Big Picture support, and 1080p graphics.
  • Joe Danger Infinity features Joe’s new adventure in a micro world where King Gumball’s magic gumball machine has brought Joe’s toys to life and they’re racing across his kitchen worktops, dining table, and games room. Built exclusively for iOS, this game contains boss battles, a cake collection challenge, and different characters to collect and play with, with each level having its own leaderboard.
  • Joe Danger Vita, as the name suggests, brings Joe Danger and Joe Danger 2 to the PS Vita.
  • Similarly, Joe Danger for Android bring Joe Danger to Google Play, Amazon Appstore, and OUYA.
  • Joe Danger Infinity & Joe Danger Touch Remastered provides ProMotion support, better power performance with new optimized shaders, multitouch improvements and more, all with a graphical overhaul.
• The Last Campfire is a puzzle game that has the player control a soul named Ember as they transverse lands beyond the dark forest, while solving environmental puzzles to aide fellow souls who have lost hope to find their purposes.
• No Man’s Sky is about exploring and surviving in an infinite procedurally generated galaxy, with the game continuously evolving as major updates grow and expand the in-game universe with new ways to play. There are several important parts of this game that make it what it is:
  • Explore: Players will be the first to land on beautiful, unknown planets where they will have to survive hazardous environments that have alien civilisations seeking their fortune and outlaws who will take it by force.
  • Build: Players can team up to build a range of structures, from small outposts to complex multi-planet colonies. They are able to farm for resources, hire helpers, and build a mobile base within their freighter.
  • Multiplayer: By summoning the social hub, the Space Anomaly, up to 32 players can form a group and go on missions together or visit each other’s bases.
• Announced at The Games Award 2023, Light No Fire, Hello Games’ upcoming game, is set on a fantasy planet the size of Earth where players go on adventures, build, survive, and explore together. This game will combine the depth of a role-playing game with the freedom of a survival sandbox.

Along with the long line of updates for No Man’s Sky and the announcement of Light No Fire, No Man Sky received a nomination for “Evolving Game” in the BAFTA Games Awards 2024 and took home the gong for “Still Playing” at the Golden Joystick Awards 2023.

Evolution: Venture

Fundraisings:

• £40k equity investment for a 2.4% stake in 2020.
• £790k (€920k in original currency) equity investment for a 26.0% stake in 2021. Investors included Calm/Storm ventures, Entrepreneur First, Form Ventures, and Kodori AG.
• £2.12m ($2.70m in original currency) equity investment for a 22.2% stake in 2023. Investors included Access EIS, Business Angel(s), Calm/Storm ventures, Crowdcube, Entrepreneur First, Form Ventures, and Kodori AG.

Grants:

• £13.5k grant awarded in 2020 by Innovate UK.
• £48.9K grant awarded in 2022 by Innovate UK.
• £235k grant awarded in 2020 by Innovate UK.

Industries: Application software, Data provision and analysis, Mental well-being, Psychiatry, psychotherapy and counselling, Video games

Buzzwords: Artificial Intelligence, Gamification, Mobile apps, eHealth

London-based thymia, founded in 2020, is on a mission to make mental health as objectively measurable and monitorable as physical health is. Of the founders, Dr Emilia Molimpakis (CEO) is a neuroscientist and an expert in using language as a biomarker for cognition (of which, there are fewer than ten people worldwide doing this). She has a PhD and post-doc from UCL in Linguistics, Neuroscience & Psychology, won the Young Innovator’s Award 2020-21, and was named one of the top scientists for mental health worldwide. Dr Stefano Goria (CTO), with over 17 years of expertise in bringing cutting edge mathematical models to production, holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics and for over eight years was a quantitative analyst for large investment banks, including JP Morgan and Citibank. Gabrielle Powell (COO) worked in finance and consulting before moving into health and health-tech in 2015. She has held leadership roles at Dr. Consulta in Brazil, playing a pivotal role in expanding the company’s network of medical centres and digital offering, and was the Director of Operations and Growth at Doctify. Alongside her current role at thymia, she is a Global Advisor for Praava Health and an Angel Investor, who focuses on health-tech and med-tech start-ups.

By utilising the latest advances in machine learning and neuropsychology, thymia are supplying mental health assessments that are powered by AI to identify mental illness and, specifically, its underlying symptoms in an accurate and objective manner. This allows for providers, payors, and employers to understand and treat mental health issues effectively regardless of where and how they arise. They support clinicians in triaging, diagnosing, and treating mental illness with their in-depth insights into mental health conditions and symptoms. With their mental wellbeing assessments, employers and providers can effectively identify several conditions in the workplace, including mental strain, burnout, exhaustion, and stress.

Their AI models combine three types of data:

• Behaviour: Every decision made by the player will count. From every tap, swipe, or keystroke along with reaction times and error rates, thymia are able to gain valuable insights about the player’s mental state.
• Voice: An individual’s speech contains a symphony of emotions, thoughts, and identity that thymia is able to interpret by analysing the acoustics and content. Included in voice acoustics is loudness levels, pauses, and tone and pitch changes, all of which helps to reveal subtle emotional cues. Insights into the cognitive state are revealed through the words and structures used.
• Video: All movements that can be captured on a device camera are tracked by thymia’s AI, such as facial micro-expressions, eye-gaze patterns, head angle, and upper body movements. Advanced video analytics are able to pick up movements that may be missed in a face-to-face interaction.

Thymia is the only company worldwide to combine behavioural, voice, and video data to develop digital mental health biomarkers. They have two distinct product suites; helios is their wellness range that provides insights into mental wellness indicators, like strain burnout, stress, distress, tiredness, and confidence, and apollo is their clinical range that provides insights into generalised anxiety, depressions, ADHD, and measure their core symptoms. Either of these suites can be embedded into any platform via their Activity Plugin, which embeds gamified activities into the client’s platform, or their Media API, which allows for existing recordings to be passed directly through thymia’s AI models.

In the middle of last year, they closed a £2m seed round so that they could further develop their product offering. Kodori Ventures led this investment round, with participation from Entrepreneur First, Syndicate Room, Calm/Storm Ventures, and Form Ventures. Around the same time, they announced their plans of expanding into mental health clinics and mental wellbeing providers in the UK, Spain, Brazil, Indonesia, Greece, Nigeria, and the US.

Evolution: Seed

Fundraising: £700k equity investment in 2021.

Grant: £80k awarded in 2023 by Longitude Prize Discovery Award.

Industries:  Application software, Care homes, Healthcare products, toiletries and living aids, Video games

Buzzwords: Artificial Intelligence, Gamification, Mobile apps

With their Head Office in the Isle of Man, Memory Lane Games is the engagement app designed for people living with Alzheimer’s and dementia. They were founded by a team of two in 2019 consisting of Bruce Elliot and Peter Quayle. Bruce Elliot (CEO) holds a twenty-year track record of building world-class, innovative eCommerce companies, and has driven a listed online payments start-up to 1 million users and $250m per year in revenues. In addition, he has been the lead on marketing, and product and business development for international online payments, gaming, venture capital, blockchain, and now digital health firms. Peter Quayle has spent more than 30 years in technology, with a specialism in applying computer science principles to IT projects and business opportunities. He is now the Project Manager at Games Global.

Memory Lane Games started by taking on the question ‘how can we make games that would help trigger happy memories and offer support to people affected by cognitive decline?” as a challenge. Their answer to this question came in the form of a set of app-based memory games on favourite topics and interests of the user. Their mission now is to improve the quality of life of those living with dementia, while also providing support for their carers and family members through accessible and localised digital health apps.

Their app, which promises to be frustration-free, contains games specifically designed to stimulate visual reasoning, memory, and the speech centres of the brain. The aim of playing the games is to trigger positive memories, conversations, and reminiscence and to invoke a calming, settling, and reassuring effect for the player of the games. Features and benefits of the app include:

• A library containing thousands of games.
• Able to successfully address wandering and sundowing, which refers to the increased confusion, agitation, and behavioural changes in individuals with dementia that often happen during late afternoon and early evening hours.
• Stimulates the speech and language centres of the brain.
• Reduces agitation and repetitive behaviours.
• Incites engagement with their interests.
• There are no time-limits or scoring within the games.
• Offline play is available once games are downloaded.

In the middle of this year, they announced their launch of a volunteer programme by partnering with Alzheimer’s Society (UK). This programme will allow volunteers to be trained in using the Memory Lane Games app so that it can become a valuable resource to support person-centred dementia care. This volunteer program is one way in which those who want to assist and support the app can do so in a structured way. It also opens a practical way to support the delivery of healthcare and workers in the under-resourced, sometimes undervalued area of care.

End of last year, Santé Group, a leading provider of Employee Benefits, Employer Wellness, and Employee Benefit Solutions in the UK, partnered with Memory Lane Games to launch their app on Santé Group’s employee benefits platform, MySanté. Alongside the app, employees will have access to a range of support articles and video-based tutorials with the aim to help them deal with the combined pressures of working and caring.

Memory Lane Games became one of only five UK companies, out of 60 applicants, in June of last year to win a place on the UK Canada AgeTech Innovation Exchange for businesses with products that have the potential to improve the health and well-being of older people. As a selected company, they will work with leading experts on aging, such as national healthcare providers, as well as with Canadian programme partners AGE-WELL and the Centre for Aging + Brain Health Innovation (CABHI).