Wales Interactive

Origins

Richard Pring and David Banner co-founded Wales Interactive back in July 2012 with the motivations for setting up the business being to create a significant games industry presence in Wales and to tap into the local graduate talent pool that they knew that existed in this area. They not only planned to put Wales on the video games development map but to create sustainable highly skilled jobs in the games sector in this part of the UK. In seven years, Wales Interactive has gone from a two-man operation in an attic room of to a state-of-the-art games studio in Bridgend’s Sony UK Technology Park with an expanding team and games portfolio.

Success Factor

The current strategy was set out from day one of the company’s conception and the plan was always to become not just a games developer but to self-publish, therefore having more control and financial reward for released products. Wales Interactive has built up their capabilities to self-publish digitally over the last few years on a wide array of eShops, starting with iTunes and Google play but expanding to a wide array of high-end gaming online gaming download stores including Steam (the biggest PC shop in the world), Playstation Store, Xbox Store, Nintendo Store and Windows Store. These stores give the firm access to a potential audience of 300 million users internationally and having this strategy to be a developer-publisher has been instrumental in its continued growth and success.

The Future

The plans going forward are to build upon its existing experience and create an even more ambitious ever-expanding company. Wales Interactive not only has a slate of new titles and IP already lined up but its ongoing expansion into interactive movies and the Asian markets is developing at record speeds. It just hasn’t just followed the other bigger gaming companies and is now in a position where people are following the firm. Its success has unlocked the opportunity for the business to create its own substantial investment pool, which is available not only to invest in its own titles but put back in to developers they collaborate with on small or large third party projects. This will enable the business to grow its diverse digital and physical catalogue of titles considerably over the next few years.