About UK Games Fund

Find out more about the UK Games Fund

Who we are

UK Games Talent and Finance CIC is a community interest company that has been established to help develop the UK games development sector, particularly at the early stage. We are not for profit and do not have share capital.

Our aim is to boost the UK’s games business and talent ecosystem. We want our funding to create jobs, promote diverse new teams, enhance skills and increase the amount of new games IPs in the UK. In short, we’re working to support the UK’s early-stage games development community.

What we do

We run both Tranzfuser and the UK Games Fund, supporting the whole spectrum of start up games developers; from talented graduates to more experienced SMEs.

Why are doing this?

We’ve learned from previous projects that we can have a positive impact by providing this type of support. The logic behind our approach is that by increasing the volume of creative teams and talent that have real-world experience in developing their own titles under their belt, the greater the chance of one of those teams and titles becoming a significant success.

The breakthrough may not come from the original project we support, but every project has positive learning impacts that are taken through into business and or personal career development.

We also think that it’s important for the UK games development sector to have its own funding delivery body, to capitalise on any opportunities that emerge in the future. We’re not a trade body or membership organisation. We are highly supportive of all of the work of Ukie and Tiga and plan to work with both of them during the life of this project.

Applications to UKGF from across the UK

The Team

UKGF is run by an experienced team of games industry and investment experts.
The team has worked together for almost 20 years on various projects, all of which have been focused on the investment in and the support of the start-up games development industry.

Paul Durrant OBE

Founder and Chief Executive
Paul is a creative business development specialist with a focus on creating win/win impacts arising from public and private sector collaborations in the digital economy. He’s worked extensively across the skills, talent and research agendas and at the interface of universities and business and contributed to policy and best practice. Paul's projects have helped thousands of individuals and hundreds of small studios across the UK indy games sector and the impacts from subsequent acquisitions and other business development has led to the generation of hundreds of millions of pounds of inward investment for the UK. Paul was awarded an OBE for services to the games industry and to education in the 2022 New Year Honours.

Paul is also interested in food-chain and related environmental matters and he is a trustee of the Bread for Good Community Benefit Society.

Jenny Duncan

Head of Operations
Over the past 15 years Jenny has worked on a number of projects at Abertay University including Dare to be Digital, BAFTA Young Game Designers and the UK Video Games Prototype Fund. She was involved in all aspects of the projects including allocation of grants, marketing, promotion, organisation and event delivery, building on her previous experience in loyalty programmes for high end retail and leisure companies.

Mark Hogarth

Director
Mark has spent over fifteen years in venture capital with a particular focus on working with high growth technology companies. He has been involved in more than 150 transactions ranging from seed investments and follow-on rounds through to IPO and exits.

Mark has served as a non-executive director for several technology companies, has been on the board of two companies quoted on AIM and is currently a Partner at Techstart Ventures.

Deborah Farley

Head of Talent and Outreach
Deborah is the go-to person for Tranzfuser (UKTGTF's annual graduate enterprise game dev competition) and is involved in every aspect of the programme; from strategic planning, to day-to-day operations.

Over the years Deborah has led the charge on the evolution of the competition, by drawing together a UK-wide network of organisations who operate as Local Hubs, designing an education resource under the banner of the Games Biz Academy, creating digital accreditations to recognise individual achievement and co-ordinating numerous events such as game jams, pitch sessions and showcases. She especially enjoys seeing the transformation of the teams during the programme as they engage with the opportunity to create the video game IP of their dreams and dive into finding out what it takes to set up their own video game studio.

Kirsty Gibson

Head of Impact
Starting out on the career path with a degree in foreign languages, Kirsty’s expertise in communication has diversified into project management and marketing. In 2011 she joined the UK Video Games Prototype Fund as Project Manager; her role focused on the development of the Prototype Fund community and relationship management, developing and maintaining proactive and responsive communication channels with applicants and key stakeholders.

Stephen Hewitt

Games Fund Portfolio Manager
Stephen has worked for over twenty years as a professional game developer. Coming from a multimedia background in coding and art, he has gone on to hold lead roles in game design, creative direction, scriptwriting and worldbuilding, and has been heavily involved in Production. He has worked in both AAA and Indie game development, has produced games for PC, consoles, and phones, and worked across a variety of genres from MMOG to casual. Along the way, he has freelanced, founded businesses, and worked for a variety of start-ups and established companies.

Congratulations to portfolio company @Roll_7! The team received their British Game BAFTA last night 👏 #BAFTAGamesAwards twitter.com/BAFTAGames/sta…

Yesterday from UK Games Fund's Twitter