This blog post will reflect guest lecturer talk by Mark Rands. Mark currently works for Barclays Eagle Labs situated in Southampton and this talk focuses more on the organization he works for and less his personal journey or skills. Barclays Eagle labs (which is an internal group in the Barclays Banking business) is a support group for startups in the UK. They hope to give support to up and coming business by providing studio spaces for them to work in along with guidance in getting their business/studio off the ground. One of the biggest advantage Barclays Eagle Labs has that in can use to help promising studios, is its wide range of connections with businesses, partners, investors, corporates, and mentors through their time as being one of the top high street banks in the UK.
The company is considered as an incubator according to Mark, this basically means that unlike other support businesses that will help a startup till the time they paid for is up and then will suddenly stop support, Barclays Eagle Labs will stick with a client until they have gained the resources and connections. They will also not just support startup studio but will also offer guidance and support to solo developers or people aspiring to start their own studio. One of the most reassuring things Mark pointed out is that Barclays Eagle Labs isn’t profit focused as long as they at least overall break even, the main goal of this from the eyes of the Barclays Banking business is to have their name in the public and investors eyes out their with it more seeming as a way to gather exposure instead of money.
Apart from the logistics of Barclays Eagle Lab, Mark also gave personal advice about planning your future into the industry and gaining support and funding from investors.
Below you can see some of the main tips I gathered from his talk -
- Identify what you want to be doing in the industry
- Choose if you want to develop a game or run a business
- If planning to create a startup investigate writing a business plan model
- Don’t be afraid to consider the route of being self employed, just make sure you look down the routes of networking and support
- Benefit of working for a studio is having your name in credits of projects which can seem more viable to other employers
- One danger with joining a studio is that you may have to sign a contract that doesn’t allow you to share your work as you don’t legally own it
- Its not to hard to get investments currently in the game industry even with the current post covid business landscape, the only issues is typically the people with the money don’t know video games so they are looking to invest in the founders and the studio that is behind the IP
- Investors know that the gaming landscape is fast moving with games being forgotten in a matter of months, so they want to know how you would support the game moving forward and how the team will interact with their community
The final area he touched upon was the different Investors that you could get behind you in industry -
- Friends and family – doing it for a love of you and what your creating
- Crowdfunding – people taking a low risk for something that you’ve preemptively tried to sell them
- Angel Investors – they’re not looking for large profit returns but see potential in what you’re trying to build and will want some other sort of payout in the future
- Adventure Capitalist firms – take on several investment opportunities with hope that a few will make serious money and the others will just about break even.
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