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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Totally off topic, but is there a thing about game studios and being in the middle of nowhere?

According to Wikipedia, Codemasters HQ is in Southam, which is a tiny town halfway attractive UK hotspots like Birmingham and Milton Keynes [0].

Similarly, Epic is in Cary, NC, a suburb of Raleigh. A bit less "middle of nowhere" than Southam maybe, but still, not particularly San Francisco or London either. What's up with that? Have game studios simply been remote longer? Or do gamedevs actually relocate en-masse to places like Southam and Cary for their jobs? How does this work? What's the employer pitch? "Sure, there's like one bar and half a supermarket, but you'll get to work on cool race games!"? (I'm not being dismissive, I'm genuinely curious if this is "a thing" and if so, how this works)

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Southam,+UK/@52.2523264,-2...

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I worked for Codemasters in the late 90s when I was 18-19. I was trying to get out of menial work while teaching myself to code, and got a temp job as a games tester. I was "commuting" from one Warwickshire village to Southam, about 20-25 miles away.

To get to work I had to get a lift to a bus stop 4 miles away, where I'd catch a coach at about 7am that went cross country to Bristol. It would drop me off in Southam, then I'd walk for about half an hour to get to the Codemasters offices which were in remote converted farm buildings outside town.

On my first day I met a guy in Southam who said he worked there so I followed him. We had gone through several muddy fields before I saw that he was wearing wellington boots for the journey. I got to work covered in mud! Luckily nobody seemed to care or notice.

To get home, I'd get a ride back into Southam from a colleague, and wait in a pub for a couple of hours before catching the same coach I came in on. At that point I'd be in another town four miles from home. Then I'd go to a pub where my friends hung out and get a ride back with them. I'd get home about midnight.

I worked out I was losing money by working there, but I was desperate to get into the games industry and out of working class menial labour, so I carried on until my temp contract ran out. If I was more savvy I would have been able to finagle myself a permanent position, but honestly I was a pretty depressed, naïve kid at the time, and didn't really know what I was doing career wise.

Later I had a week long interview at another studio, Attention To Detail (who made Rollcage for the PS1) who were similarly remote. The other big game developer in the region was Blitz Games which was at least in Leamington Spa. I only had to get 2 buses to get to my interview there.

Former Blitzer here (early 2000s). I went for an interview at codies about 2010, and it had a really strange vibe. People talking in hushed tones in corridors, stuff like that. I completely bombed the interview, but would have declined the offer anyway. I heard bad things about overtime, not sure if it's changed in the last 10 years or not.

Ah, I almost got a job as a level designer at Blitz Games but I found out from an insider that they gave it to a guy who had done the exact thing at another company. They would have got me on board if he hadn't shown up.

All the game developers I applied to were incredibly slow in their communications. It would take weeks to arrange an interview and subsequently get a response back from them. I often thought, "Can I afford to take the time to apply to another games company?" Eventually I got into web dev with a couple of friends of mine, and work on games in my own time.

I think you did the right thing. Although game development was pretty fun at times, I feel like it had a negative effect on my programming career. There was no culture of learning, it was all about getting to the next release date in one piece!

Wouldn’t have been faster to bicycle there?

There's a lot of reasoning here, and some of it makes sense. But a lot of the time it's just where the founders are from. In the 80s when the home-computer revolution was kicking off, a lot of the kids/young adults that got good at making games and made a fortune off the nascent industry then went off to set up development studios. They were often from the shires, because it was a wealthy/middle-class pursuit, or was at least easier to get going when the family support machine was backing you.

The low pay thing I think is a misnomer, I worked in games from 1995-2005, and although yeah the pay wasn't great compared to other industries, it wasn't bad, and I worked full-time for three different London based studios and contracted for another two. It was certainly enough to live in London (at least then before the property market went crazy)

This is the closest answer. I was there. Codies actually got its start in a small light industrial unit in Banbury, about 20 miles down the road, but when the Darling family bought a run-down farm in Southam we all (well, probably less than 10 people at that point) relocated to some hastily renovated stables there. I don’t think it was ever anticipated to be a huge employment hub. That just sort of happened. We gradually grew a crop of portable buildings out the back to accommodate all the programmers that came to work on special projects as the company moved beyond the budget games market, and a small team of builders were on site for literally years gradually converting outbuildings and improving the house etc. There were no other developers around, save for Archer McLean who coincidentally lived a couple of fields away. The Leamington-centric games dev community all grew out of Codies. I expect that’s a good part of why the boys picked up CBEs a few years ago.

I guess you probably know my good friend Rich Aplin?

No, I don’t think so, but perhaps he joined around when I left in ‘92. The company was growing very fast back then.

[added minutes later] Well, that’s spooky. Guess who is the ninth card in my Facebook ‘people you may know’ this morning...

According to Google maps, Southam is about 25 minutes drive to Coventry or 15 minutes to Leamington Spa. It's not in the "middle of nowhere" in any important sense.

And Leamington is quite attractive - not a bad place to live. Coventry is probably ok too. Personally I would much rather be in a town like Leamington Spa than Birmingham or Milton Keynes. In general, small and medium size towns in the UK are far nicer than the big cities.

Yeah, once you're outside cities, most non-retail businesses tend to be found on the outskirts of towns (in business parks) or further out than that. My dad would usually drive 25-30 minutes to get to his office, so 15 minutes from Leamington is basically nothing.

Personally I wouldn't call anywhere in the UK 'remote' till you start going far north. I've lived in AU first, then GB so maybe my view is biased.

Remote can mean isolated and disconnected as much as faraway and distant. Plenty of the UK is remote in that sense. I work in a part of Surrey where, despite there being frequent trains to London, the actual town and surrounding area is very hard to get around without a car (and the public transport options there are are significantly less frequent than trains away from the place).

Infrastructure is as much a factor as proximity I'd say.

This is true and my experience is the UK has terrible infrastructure and cars are necessary so I agree.

I’m from Leamington, loads of people here work for Codemasters.

I have worked in Coventry for a year and I stayed in Birmingham as the hotels in Coventry and area are depressing. As the restaurant options are much better in Birmingham compared to Coventry.

Did enjoy the small Chinese place in the city centre though :)

Also Leamington has a few big developers too(Ubisoft has a studio there) so it's not like it's a complete games development desert out there - there is big industry around.

No Coventry is not ok. You’re right about leamington though

Ha, first time I’ve ever seen Coventry mentioned on HN and it’s getting bad press! I live here, it’s nice (if you stay in Earlsdon).

I’m from Coventry. It deserves the bad press.. sadly.

Ah, ok. I haven't been to Coventry since I was a kid. I should probably have looked up some information or something before posting.

I'm mostly guessing here, but I'd say it's because a lot of these companies were probably founded by a couple of mates back in the 8/16-bit Acorn/Commodore/Atari era and just stayed where they were.

I guess that it also helps a lot if there is little else around to distract kids from computers. There are a lot more things to throw your youthful enthusiasm at in a place with significant nightlife (that isn't the pub you share with your dad and his dad)

Gaming companies generally have a surplus of potential employees. These employees will do a lot to work in the gaming industry (see crunch time, lower pay, etc, etc.). So employees will move to where the companies are.

If you look at older companies they're often headquartered in second or third tier areas. Not middle of nowhere but also not the hip city. Seattle wasn't a hot place when Microsoft started there. South Bay (Google, Yahoo, etc, etc.) is pretty desolate compared to San Francisco and an 45 minute drive away. However commercial rent is cheaper and there's room to expand over time.

It's only companies that don't have good ways of pulling in employees that tend to locate in the hip areas as they need every advantage they can get.

edit: Also if your employees are older and with kids then they value more than living in the "hip" places. They want a nice calm suburban location with good schools.

It's certainly been a pattern for a while. Rare (obviously long since part of MGS) were/are based near Twycross, and Sierra Online were based in MFN long before it was cool.

Many years ago I once had to visit Rare for work and was surprised by the security. I wonder if part of it is that they aren't going to be visited by a constant stream of fans if they're harder to reach/find. From outside the gates it was totally un-obvious that it was the HQ of one of the most influential game dev studios of the 80s and 90s.

That being said, plenty of companies are still based in reasonably sized towns: Jagex and Frontier are both in a science park on the edge of Cambridge, EA in Guildford certainly used to be and maybe still are in an otherwise normal business park.

And before Twycross, Ashby-de-la-Zouch!

EA for a long time were in an office building five minutes walk from Guildford High Street.

I remember years ago being approached about a job for a company in Exeter, a town stuck out on the western tip of England, with no possibility of remote. The job required very specific tech skills. When I told the recruiter I had no intention of moving to Exeter, he said glumly "that's what everyone says, but the client is dead set against remote". Nothing against Exeter, I've heard it's a nice place to visit, but I kind of wondered what galaxy-brain thinking was going on there.

Exeter is a very livable small city (130k people) in a lovely part of the country. I'm not saying you should have uprooted your life to move there, but for many people it would be a great lifestyle move.

There's a wider issue with UK businesses being a bit unambitious, and staying in locations where availability of employees affects their ability to grow. But there are far worse places than Devon.

Not a bad place by any means, but employers can't have it both ways. If they want to stay in a location where people aren't likely to move to, that's fine, but then they have to accept that remote is the only way they'll attract people with the skills they need.

Small hotspots appear where people leave companies, start their own and don't want to move.

Guildford is such a place for games in the UK. Yes, it's not too far from London but it's also fairly suburban. That sprung from Bullfrog/Lionhead, I guess. Hello Games, Criterion and Media Molecule are all based there.

The most famous example is the Seattle/Redmond area, where that hotspot sprung from Microsoft.

I expect with the likes of Guildford it's also something of an economic decision. Less expensive than being based in London, while being reasonably connected to potentially catch some of that workforce and being accessible enough for those travelling from overseas for business.

Redmond is also the home of Nintendo of America, which probably helps.

Game studios provide shitty salaries while at the same time having a dearth of talent available (because, game dev, dude...). By having offices in low cost of living places, they can maintain this equilibrium without raising wages.

> Game studios provide shitty salaries while at the same time having a dearth of talent available

Do you mean the opposite of dearth?

Yeah

surfeit?

Glut?

An excolleague of mine worked for codemasters in the mid 90s, apparently codemasters was originally started by two brothers in a barn near their house. As the company took off they expanded and build upon the barn, ultimately absorbing it into the building it became. It was explained to me that you could still see support structures from the original barn with the office building itself.

So in this case it seems like a literal physical expansion of the classic garage coder idea.

I thought it was originally started in their bedroom - the Darlings were still at school when they started out IIRC

Yes, the potted history is Galactic Software (selling games from hand-drawn ads in Popular Computing Weekly) when they were still at school in Somerset, then worked with Mirrorsoft and Mastertronic in London, then off to start Codemasters in Banbury.

Spot on!

It's very interesting.

Nottingham is home of Dambuster Studios (former Free Radical Design Ltd. (later Crytek UK Limited)).

Runescape was also operated from the house of the founders parents in Nottingham before they got their offices, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/dec/11/games.onl...

DMA Design (which later became Rockstar North, developers of Grand Theft Auto) were formed in Dundee. Not exactly the middle of nowhere, but probably not where you'd expect to find one of the world's most popular video game franchises.

Team17 also have a publishing arm in Nottingham, although their HQ is in Wakefield I believe.

Sumo Digital as well although not sure if they make games in Notts - looks like they have a few locations around the UK

In the UK, curiously, the seaside / holiday town of Bournemouth has become somewhat of a hotspot for the CGI industry, with the local university hosting the National Centre for Computer Animation.

Bournemouth has been trying to make silicon beach a thing for a while now. There is a reasonable amount of tech going on here tbh.

I grew up in Durham, NC, near Cary.

The Raleigh/Durham area is very car-centric, and Epic is right next to the interstate highway. It's intended that you'll arrive by car, probably via the highway -- which is relatively easy whether you live in Cary, in downtown Raleigh, or somewhere else.

In my twenties, I remember attending a swing dance workshop in Durham. It was very well attended; the instructors had recently moved from San Francisco and had been pioneers in the swing dance community there.

At the time I didn't understand how one could be riding high in San Francisco and want to leave. But people who relocate to Raleigh/Durham often say that they move for the nice weather, for the low cost of living, for the fact that it offers a lot of culture while being fairly laid back.

It has always been this way. High cost, high risk, need lots of staff, so have really low overheads.

Only in the last... 8? Years (aside from Sony) we've seen big places in london, due to massive mobile profits.

Not sure even manchester has gotten many big places since psygnosis.

I used to work for Sony Computer Entertainment at the EU HQ in London, there were a few games studios there, all located around the same street just off Oxford Circus, along with a big R&D office.

I think the London Studio is still there, not sure what they are working on now though.

King who make candy crush are near there too, I went for a job interview with them around 6 years ago, you could tell at that time, judging by the offices, they were not strapped for cash...

Biased as I went there, but that's very close to the University of Warwick. I studied Maths, and then went into Software Engineering in London, but a lot of the CS grads went into local game studios like Codemasters.

Game devs are payed way less than regular devs, no way they'd live in a big city on a small "passion" wage.

Source: worked in Paris for a medium Game Studio on a small wage before calling it quits

"Coventry & Warwickshire has a globally significant gaming cluster which is one of the largest in the UK. The ‘Silicon Spa’ cluster employs over 2000 highly skilled people, equating to over 10% of the UK total in games development."

http://backspaceuk.com/siliconspa/home-2.html

Games take years to develop and come with a lot of risks I suspect overheads of London office space isn't very attractive.

Also I'd imagine game dev is quite insular, it's not B2B other than dealing with publishers, so no need to be in close proximity to any "tech hub"

The value proposition for employees is an interesting one, I guess the allure of working in games is enough

What is practicality worth?

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