By Professor Philip Plowden, Interim Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive, University of Staffordshire.
The UK video games consumer market reached a record £8.76 billion in 2025, growing by 7.4% year-on-year. It remains one of the UK’s fastest-growing creative and technology sectors. There are regional clusters of activity in disparate areas – from Dundee to Guildford, Leamington Spa to Manchester. And Stoke-on-Trent is particularly well-placed to stake out its own strong claim, drawing on the global reputation of the Games, AI and Computing courses at the University of Staffordshire.
Our recent Games Graduation show saw more than 290 students presenting their work, making the Games GradEx one of the largest student showcases of its type in Europe. The event attracted over a hundred industry guests from companies including Rebellion, EA, Jagex, Cloud Imperium, Flix, Kwalee, and Playground – all of them coming to our city to engage with graduating students. It is no surprise that more of our graduates go on to work in the industry than from any other UK university.
Jobs in the games industry are hugely diverse – from artists and coders to designers and marketers – and they are equally sought after. But Games students have two advantages, both of which have the potential to bring benefits to the city. First, the technical and creative skills that the students develop in a Games context are highly sought after in other technology areas.
Down at the university’s Centre for Health Innovation in Stafford, you can see how simulation underpins training and professional development for health care professionals, from doctors to nurses and paramedics.
Equally the region’s many visitor attractions will testify to the importance of immersive environments in engaging with potential visitors from across the world. And our region’s businesses will already be deeply involved in using Business Intelligence and starting to deploy the new technologies based around Artificial Intelligence. All of these – and many more – are careers that our Games students have open to them.
But the second advantage is just as significant – the Games industry still has its roots in small companies that innovate, that create new products and are fast out to market to engage with consumers. From the small beginnings, significant companies grow. Our graduating students are often planning to set up their own independent studios, to pursue the development of the ideas that they’ve already been working on, with the ambition to become the global names of the future.
Universities such as Staffordshire can have a key role in enabling and supporting the setting up of new business ventures and then providing the advice and assistance to help the business to grow, until they are ready to move on to the next stage of their commercial development.
This desire for a technology-led eco-system in the city has its expression in the original vision of Silicon Stoke, and is further articulated in the Digital Stoke publications, which make the point that the city already punches significantly above its weight in this space.
What is needed is action to provide the facilities, the support and the encouragement to keep the talent of the graduating students in our city and region.
The city already has a nationally leading games education community, recognised by industry and built around the talent of its students, graduates and staff. The next step is to turn that academic excellence into business creation, graduate retention and long-term economic value for the city.
With this in mind, the University of Staffordshire is committed to creating incubation facilities to support our students and our graduates and, in time, the broader entrepreneurial talent that exists across the city.
Too often, however, these fine plans end up getting bogged down as they suffer from mission-creep and complexity. So, the University has started the process of creating dedicated incubation space, with the target of having this up and running for the graduating students during the summer – enabling them to stay in the city, working with their existing professional groups but drawing in talent to work with them.
We have identified the space on our Stoke campus and now need to put in place the necessary kit and equipment. We will then start working to identify their ongoing support needs, whether drawing on the industry experience of our academic staff and our games professionals in residence, or looking at legal and commercial support that they may need.
This is a necessary first step, and we are sufficiently confident in its success that we have started to plan for the next stages in the development – growing the space and the numbers, and starting to expand the range of digital and creative industries that we can support.
We will need to reach out to the major organisations in our city so that we can work in partnership with you, ensuring that you can start to shape and grow your own talent pipelines.
If we want our city to succeed, it will do so because of the talent that we are able to grow and to nurture, whether within or external to the university. And incubation spaces are a great expression of the power of partnership between universities and industry and the public sector.
The origins of the University of Staffordshire lie with the founding of the Central School of Science and Technology in 1914, to support the city’s coal mining and ceramics industries – well over a century ago. The University still occupies that original building, now named Cadman in honour of the mining engineer John Cadman, and over its door is a frieze representing the great industries of the city at the time – ceramics and mining.
It is very apposite that the building now houses the industries of the future – Computer Games, Artificial Intelligence, and Computing. The challenge is to ensure that our city is able to be at the forefront of these sectors. These steps to retain and grow our talent are an essential starting point.”
