Ben, 38, is a software engineer and physics programmer based in Whickham. He currently works for an internationally based, fully remote games company called Straight4. Although he may currently be working “both everywhere and nowhere”, as he describes it, Ben actually started his career working much more locally in Eutechnyx in Gateshead before switching companies to larger companies such as Sumo and Ubisoft Reflection, which is in Gosforth. 

 

“There's a lot more of a gaming hub in the North East than people realise,” Ben continued, “There's obviously a lot bigger hubs out there but there's a lot of technology in the North East and that kind of spills over into the gaming industry. There's obviously Ubisoft Reflections where I used to work but Ubisoft also has a customer relations service in Haymarket, so it's very central.”

 

It's not just big companies that are out there, smaller companies are also taking part in Newcastle's thriving games scene such as CoconutLizard, People Can Fly, Atom Hawk and Cardboard Sword. “Some of these studios can only be like three or four people putting out like indie games or mobile games but they're all out there contributing to the industry”

 

“The other thing is companies get bought over, Pitbull interactive got bought out by Epic games so they’ve contributed to games like FORTNITE, some of that would have been made in the north east or partly anyway. ”

 

Ben also went on to give some advice to those wanting to work in the industry. He says “The main thing is to be passionate, you’ve really got to want. I've interviewed loads of graduates and a lot of them come from an engineering background however I think art and design roles are equally, if not more competitive. If you haven’t gone through further education yet then choose a games related course as that’ll set you up the best.”

 

While it may be a very competitive industry, it certainly provides many different jobs with highly specialised roles and vast amounts of potential no matter what you’re interested in. The North East is becoming an ever growing centre for games development.