Buoyed by a dynamic domestic market and greater global visibility, Spain’s video game industry is on the rise with a handful of studios looking to compete with sector giants.
"The sector is currently enjoying good momentum,” Jose Maria Moreno, the secretary general of Spanish video games association Aevi which groups over 80 Spanish video game firms, told AFP.
"Spain is in the process of finding its place on the world map” of video game makers, he added.
There are no video game industry heavyweights in the country like France’s Ubisoft, Poland’s CD Projekt or Electronic Arts of the United States, but there are many independent studios that are "very creative”, Moreno said.
And their numbers are growing. There are 790 production studios currently operating in Spain, up from just 330 a decade ago, according to the sector’s employers’ organization DEV.
Their growth is fueled by a rise in sales of video games to the soaring number of gamers in Spain, currently estimated at around 20 million people.
Sales of games made by Spanish studios jumped to 1.38 billion euros ($1.54 billion) in 2022 from just 314 million euros in 2013, according to DEV figures.
‘Good boost’
"For a long time, Spanish games lacked visibility. But that’s changing,” said Pedro Gonzalez Calero, a computer engineering professor at Madrid’s Complutense University and the organizer of the Guerrilla Game Festival held every year in November in the Spanish capital. Several long-established Spanish studios are already internationally renowned, such as The Game Kitchen, whose game action-adventure game "Blasphemous”, featuring a sword-wielding silent knight, has sold several million copies.
Other smaller studios or those founded more recently are starting to make a name for themselves, such as Nomada Studio whose game "Gris” has sold three million copies and picked up a prize at the 2019 Game Awards in Los Angeles, considered the "Oscars” of gaming. "Winning this award gave us a good boost. It was a bit unexpected because it was our first game,” said Roger Mendoza, who co-founded the studio in 2016 in Barcelona, Spain’s second-largest city where about a third of the country’s video game studios are based.
Nomada Studios presented its second game called "Neva” at an event in the Mediterranean coastal city earlier this month which Mendoza said will allow the studio to "continue its growth”.
Spanish studios can rely on a highly skilled young work force, thanks to extensive training schemes, but the sector remains economically fragile.
‘Very competitive’
While the arrival of foreign capital has given Spanish studios more resources to develop their projects, for many studios long-term planning "remains a challenge” due to a lack of financing, said Gonzalez Calero, the computer engineering professor.
Moreno agreed, warning that "the international market is very competitive...to make your mark, you need talent, but you also need a solid financial base.”
The Spanish video games sector is also suffering from a "brain drain” as qualified workers move abroad for better paid positions and the lack of a "benchmark” studio, he added.
One in two studios in Spain have annual sales of less than 200,000 euros, according to the sector’s employers’ organization DEV which is calling for measures to "improve the daily lives” of game creators.
The organization and Spanish video games association Aevi are both calling for a more favorable tax regime along the lines of those in place in Britain and France.
Lower taxes in those nations have made it possible "to increase the number of productions and attract major investors, with a significant multiplier effect” for the local economy, according to Aevi.—AFP