One year after PGC Barcelona's global games hub panel: What's changed?

• The city's gaming talent boom shows no sign of slowing.
• The funding gap highlighted by last year's panellists remains, despite billions flowing through the wider industry.
• As the conversation resumes in 2026, Barcelona's ambition to create globally successful games and franchises is gaining ground.

At the first Pocket Gamer Connects Barcelona in June 2025, a panel of the some of mobile gaming’s biggest names: King, Scopely, Rovio, FunPlus and incubator GameBCN, hosted by former Sandsoft CEO David Fernández, sat down to answer questions surrounding whether or not they thought the city had gone from rising star to a global gaming hub. 

A year on, next week at Pocket Gamer Barcelona 2026 (June 15th and 16th), the discussion around Barcelona's emergence as a centre for games development continues. Leaders from Patrones & Escondites, Digital Legends, Gameloft Barcelona, Piccolo Studios and Ubisoft Barcelona Mobile are taking the stage for the ‘Barcelona Rising: Emergence of a Global Hub for the Games Industry’ panel.

With the conversation set to continue, we look back at the issues that dominated last year's discussion and the developments that have since followed.

The talent question

In 2025: Rovio's Luis de la Cámara credited King with putting Barcelona "on the map" and described a "snowball effect" as each new studio made the next easier to justify. King's own general manager, Oriol Canudas, called it a gamble that paid off: "These first movers, King being one, took a bit of a risk. They took a leap of faith."

Now: The snowball kept rolling. As seen in our recently released Iberia Region Report, Catalonia now counts 262 games companies and more than 5,100 staff, about 53% of Spain's games revenue. The arrivals and expansions keep coming, from Larian's Barcelona team working on its post-Baldur's Gate 3 RPGs to Paradox shipping Europa Universalis V out of its Barcelona-based Tinto studio in late 2025. 

The capital question

In 2025: GameBCN founder Simón Lee pinpointed the one weak spot. "We have the specialisation, the technology and institutional support - we just miss a little bit of funding," he said. "Maybe that's the missing gap." De la Cámara pointed to where some of it might come from, flagging the Gulf's appetite for games: "They're very bullish on the games industry, and they're investing very heavily."

Now: Catalonia's game startup ecosystem continues to expand in studio count, jobs and international visibility, but the headline funding figures remain modest. Gulf capital’s presence in Barcelona appears to be more visible through ownership links to major games publishers, such as Savvy’s ownership of Scopely, rather than through a major increase in venture funding for locally founded studios.

The creation question

In 2025: Canudas pushed back on Barcelona's old "service studio" image, arguing it now creates rather than executes: "In Barcelona, we make games end to end, from scratch to launch and publishing. We are not just a satellite studio that executes for others."

Now: The debate has shifted from whether Barcelona can build games to whether it can produce more homegrown global hits. This is evident in PocketGamer.biz's recently released Top 30 Iberia Game Makers list, which describes Spain as home to many of the world's top publishers, while noting that the wider region is "still chasing more homegrown IP with the potential to become global successes”.

However, that is not to say there aren't any - Socialpoint produced global hits like Dragon City and Monster Legends, while Nomada Studio built acclaimed original IPs in GRIS and Neva. Across Iberia, companies such as Cosmicode, Axes In Motion and Bluetile show the same push toward locally made games with international reach.

The conversation continues 

Three key points emerged: a growth story that built significant momentum and established Barcelona as a leading games hub, a funding gap that represents untapped potential and a city that creates original intellectual property, with increasing opportunities to retain ownership and capture more of the value 

You can learn about the latest developments for the region’s industry at PGC Barcelona on June 15th and 16th - tickets are available here.