Join LES B&I and Steven Webb for a webinar on “Fun and Games – inside a video games developer” on 28th January!
Steven is the General Counsel and Company Secretary of Sumo Group plc, one of the UK’s largest providers of end-to-end creative development and co-development services to the video games industry.
Video game sales are reported to be greater than the film and music industries combined, reached $159 billion in 2020 (up over 9% from 2019) and are forecast to be over $200 billion by 2023. Some of the largest companies in the world top the video game sales charts – Tencent, Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon – and Sumo counts them all as clients.
Only launched in 2003, Sumo has grown rapidly and was listed on the AIM market in December 2017 (when Steven joined the business). In the following three years, the business has nearly trebled in terms of number of people and expanded geographically within and outside the UK. Starting life as a “work for hire” developer providing extra capacity for other developers and game publishers for certain sections of a game’s development, success led to being given entire responsibility for full projects. More recently, Sumo has created its own games – notably Spyder and Little Orpheus, both published on Apple Arcade.
As a young and fast-growing sector, there have been significant industry shifts – from console to mobile; premium to free to play and now subscription models from the likes of Google and Apple.
Sumo’s evolving business model, in a dynamic industry and based on creative works gives rise to a number of different intellectual property considerations that Steven will describe in this session.
LES Members – Free
Non Members – £25