Bafta Video games Awards: Gaming’s greatest names hit purple carpet

Marc Cieslak
News correspondent, reporting from the purple carpet

The international video video games business was price nearly $200bn (£147bn) final 12 months, however estimates recommend greater than 9,000 employees within the sector misplaced their jobs.

There had been additionally a number of studio closures and undertaking cancellations.

So what’s happening?

Alanah Pearce, who’s labored as a online game author, actress and journalist and seems in greatest recreation nominee Dispatch, tells BBC News it is a “frustrating” state of affairs.

While the business remains to be “incredibly profitable”, she says, it’s struggling to draw funding in the identical method it used to, particularly with synthetic intelligence (AI) swallowing up enormous quantities of money and competitors from streaming websites and social media drawing gamers’ consideration elsewhere.

As a end result, Alanah says, corporations are “nervous to make anything that isn’t almost guaranteed profit, which is very difficult”.

Generative AI particularly looms giant over the video games business in one other method, in accordance with Alanah, as builders reckon with the implications of the expertise.

Many are strongly against its use, she says, and there appears to be a need throughout the business to “keep things human-made”.

“And I do think that events like Bafta really remind us of the people in the room who matter and are the reason that we love video games so much,” she says.