From classroom to console: Suffolk event spotlights the East of England's fast-growing indie games scene

An event at the University of Suffolk's e-sport building in Ipswich on Wednesday brought together independent game developers, studios and campaigners to celebrate a corner of the British games industry that has expanded dramatically in recent years. The gathering, hosted by Game Anglia, focused on the region's growing cluster of small studios and the career routes now open to people based in Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk.

One of the headline voices was Jarvs Tasker, director and founder of Jarvs Indie Insights, a firm providing communications and marketing support within the gaming sector. Tasker, now based in Exeter, was 28 when chronic illness forced her to abandon a teaching career in 2019 — a decision she describes as one of the hardest of her life, but one that opened a route into an industry she had always been close to.

Seven years on, she says the move has paid off handsomely: her current earnings are roughly double the annual salary she left behind in the classroom. Her estimate of the gap is even more striking. She believes it could have taken her the best part of 20 years of steady teaching to reach the level she earns now, a comparison that has become the memorable line of the visit.

The transition, she explains, was less a leap into the unknown than a sideways step. After leaving education she began volunteering for PlayStation's YouTube channel, and quickly discovered how much of her existing skill set travelled with her. Running an online audience, she notes, requires much the same patience, authority and instinct for reading a group's mood as managing a classroom — a set of transferable skills that rarely get credited to the games sector.

Tasker is also keen to challenge the idea that games is a young person's industry. It is, she points out, one of the few fields where people frequently arrive later in life, often bringing experience from unrelated sectors with them. And while she suspects young people still fail to appreciate how many different pathways exist inside games — not just coding, but marketing, community management, business development and more — she believes the sector's culture is broadly welcoming of genuine enthusiasm.

What that culture will not tolerate, in her view, is cynicism. The games community, she says, is remarkably strong at rallying around people who genuinely love their craft, and equally quick to spot those who are in it purely for the money. Her advice to anyone considering the route is blunt: passion matters more than almost anything else.

Her comments on artificial intelligence were equally emphatic. Tasker believes the industry has been notably more resistant to AI than many creative sectors, and says players largely share that instinct. Rather than reading that resistance as obstruction, she sees it as something to be proud of, arguing that the audience is deliberately rewarding human-made creativity and is comfortable rejecting anything that feels synthetic.

Mark Backler, who works for Game Anglia raising awareness about careers in gaming, said the event's location was symbolic. The UK games industry is now among the largest in the country, he noted, and while competition for attention remains fierce, the barriers to getting an independent title built and released have never been lower. His framing is blunt: it is now roughly as realistic to become a games developer as it is to become a mainstream content creator — genuinely difficult to stand out among the volume of material, but far from impossible.

On AI, Backler was more cautious than Tasker. He said it remains genuinely difficult to predict how the technology will reshape the sector, though he confirmed that significant numbers of players are hostile to its use. That tension, he implied, is one the industry will have to navigate carefully as tools spread.

Regional growth was the theme of Sam Read-Graves, a developer working on projects in the East of England. He said the sector here has "grown massively in the past 10 years", driven in large part by schemes such as Game Anglia. His argument is that those programmes have created dense concentrations of students and developers in the region, which in turn has begun attracting larger studios capable of producing major titles.

Read-Graves was careful, however, not to overstate the region's ambitions. Blockbusters in the mould of Call of Duty or FIFA, he said, are not realistic East of England projects while the area lacks big-studio infrastructure. But for independent developers, he sees no reason why a game cannot scale into a serious commercial success — a distinction he considers central to the region's growth story.

That optimism was echoed by Abbygale Dunn, 22, founder and director of Astral Forge, an independent game development company based in Essex. Dunn studied game design and programming at university, where she counted only about three women on the entire course. Today, she says, there is so much space for women in the sector that the warning she would give to younger applicants is no longer about the industry itself, but about outdated assumptions elsewhere.

She describes the reception she has received as uniformly welcoming, and says that working as a programmer — still a comparatively rare role for women — has never once left her feeling out of place.

Not everyone in the room was so sanguine. Omar Khalil, game scout lead at Entity, said there is no shortage of talent anywhere in the UK. The harder problem, he argued, is breaking through: with so many titles reaching the market, good games are not in short supply, but the attention economy rewards only a handful. How independent developers secure visibility, he said, remains the single biggest obstacle facing the sector.

Taken together, the event offered a picture of a regional industry gaining confidence. A former teacher earning double her old salary, a 22-year-old studio founder, and developers warning that talent is abundant but recognition is scarce: the East of England's games scene is producing the work faster than the marketing pipelines can carry it.