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- Games London one of our BFI National Lottery Innovation Challenge Fund award grant recipients
- Funding will support creation of a new toolkit built with industry experts and a cohort of studios working on their first or second game
- Designed to address barriers faced by smaller teams from underrepresented backgrounds when releasing games in the competitive global games market
Film London’s Games London team will launch an original resource for video games self-publishing in 2025 – after being picked as a recipient of the BFI National Lottery Innovation Challenge Fund.
‘Access to Market: Self-Publishing Toolkit’ will be built over the next two years using live market intelligence, input from industry experts and devised in collaboration with a cohort of studios led by underrepresented talent.
The toolkit will address barriers faced by emerging smaller teams when bringing their first or second games to the competitive global video games market – and also eventually provide an industry-wide resource for anyone looking to self-publish their game.
Funding was announced today by the BFI (link). Games London, part of Film London, is one of four awardees.
THE CHALLENGE FUND
The BFI National Lottery Innovation Challenge Fund seeks to support new solutions to the UK screen sector’s most critical challenges. Between 2024 and 2026, up to £1.8 million will be distributed across up to six challenges, to help not-for-profit organisations to innovate, developing new approaches to persistent problems, whilst also gaining insights that benefit the whole screen sector.
The fund’s first awards for games will provide £510k of National Lottery funding to four innovative projects to support the video games industry, addressing two specific challenges. The first is to develop transformative solutions to collect and publish useful open data for the UK video games industry; the second focuses on the development of new tools, technology or approaches to address the barriers facing emerging under-represented developers and to support them to bring their products to market. Games London’s project falls under the second challenge.
GET INVOLVED
In the first year Games London will recruit a cohort of UK games studios looking to publish their first game in the next 18-24 months and create the toolkit in a series of exploratory workshops with the cohort and key experts.
Starting in Q3/Q4 2025 the project’s toolkit will be live for developers to use and refer to, and will be updated via open feedback from the development community through the rest of 2025 and into the following year.
The call is now open for the initial cohort of studios – Games London is also keen to hear from any experts or potential advisors to contribute to the project also. Expressions of interest are invited via this form:
