Show me the money: UKIE CEO Nick Poole on how a more realistic investment landscape is beginning to emerge

This is the first article in a regular new column by UKIE CEO Nick Poole.

This week I’m at London Guildhall for the 2026 Venture Capital Summit, an annual shin-dig where entrepreneurs rub shoulders with hedge fund managers, regulators and family officers. 

With turbulence in global markets and currencies fluctuating wildly, they’ll all be asking themselves the same questions – where should I deploy my capital and how do I minimise my risk? 

I’ll be putting on my best finance bro gilet to explain why, despite our reputation as a hit-driven rollercoaster of an industry, investing in games could be the smartest move they make this year.

The state of industry investment

We all know the story. VC investment into games spiked in Q3 to Q4 2021 as new players flocked to games to distract from a global pandemic. The lifting of restrictions and some high-profile failures led to a slowdown which became a wholesale retrenchment of private equity as development costs continued to spiral.

Since 2024, we’ve been in what one investor at Pocket Gamer Connects London referred to as an ‘investment winter’. Publishers who once offered deals of £1m+ were suddenly asking what a studio could deliver for £200k. While startup capital remained relatively buoyant, scaling capital became incredibly scarce, particularly for anything that looked like new IP.

It’s too early to say that winter is turning to spring, but I think we are beginning to see a new, perhaps slightly more realistic investment landscape beginning to emerge.

Take the announcement this week from seasoned games investors Griffin Gaming Partners of a new $100m Special Opportunities Fund. Despite having the kind of name that the CIA used to give their nation-building adventures in the '90s, this fund looks to be a really smart play. It is hyper-focused on a sub-sector with real scaling potential, able to deploy quickly and realistic about the returns. 

Meanwhile, the Denver and Berlin-based games-focused VC Bitkraft looks to be growing its portfolio of ‘games ecosystem’ investments, including the recent $275m ‘Synthetic Reality’ round which saw the firm place major bets at the intersection of video games, AI and web3.

Waking up

Closer to home, the Government seems to be waking up to the fact that the industry needs strong domestic investment if we are to avoid becoming a workhorse for someone else’s economy. One decisive moment came in a presentation during the London Games Festival which exposed the fact that even powerhouses like Finland can end up generating value that is monetised elsewhere.

The move by the UK Games Fund to expand the thresholds on their funding support has the potential to be a game-changer, signalling a significant improvement for early-stage studios. Meanwhile, publishers are starting to get nervous about their pipeline – in the recent UK delegation to GDC, we saw real competitive interest in picking up new titles. 

With more people like Griffin and Bitkraft starting to look at the ‘investment gap’ between £20 to £50m and risk appetites at the very top end starting to thaw (driven partly by the fact that there is too much capital waiting for deployment), it seems the stage is set for a genuine upswing in the next 18 months.

Now, where did I put that gilet?

You can meet with investors and discover new funding opportunities at Pocket Gamer Connects. Meet with local experts during upcoming events like PGC Summit Malmö on May 27th to 28th and PGC Barcelona on June 15th to 16th.