Scotland's games industry, from Dundee's GTA roots to the browser's next chapter
Scotland helped invent the modern video game in Dundee. Its next chapter is being written in the browser
When the Scottish Government set out a £1 billion ambition for the country's video games industry earlier this year, it was building on a heritage few places can match.
Grand Theft Auto, one of the most commercially successful entertainment franchises ever made, was devised by the Dundee firm DMA Design before passing to Edinburgh's Rockstar North. Lemmings came out of the same city. 4J Studios, also Dundee-based, brought Minecraft to consoles.
For a country of its size, Scotland has an outsized claim on how the modern game was shaped.
That heritage is now a working industry rather than a memory. Scotland's games sector grew from 15 companies in 2010 to around 130 by 2024, turning over an estimated £340 million a year, and Dundee holds one of the highest concentrations of games companies of any town or city in the United Kingdom. Abertay University, which created the world's first computer games degree, is still ranked among the best places in Europe to study the craft. The question facing the sector is the same one facing games everywhere: as the ways people reach a game multiply, which of them is worth betting on next.
The console is no longer the default front door
For most of the industry's life, getting to a game meant owning the right console or the most expensive PC. That assumption is loosening. Subscription services, cloud streaming and mobile have each chipped away at the idea that play begins with a purchase, and the timing is awkward for hardware in particular. Dedicated consoles are caught in a global shortage of memory and storage chips, driven by the AI build-out, that is pushing prices up and launch dates back.
At the other end of that spectrum is the browser, where a game is simply a webpage. No download, no storage, no store taking its cut, just a tab that opens and a game that starts. Long dismissed as the home of throwaway time-fillers, this corner has grown into a genuine category, and it is one where small studios with a sharp idea can reach a large audience without negotiating their way onto a storefront first.
A model built for reach rather than hardware
The platforms that have made instant browser play work share a single bet: that the easiest game to reach is the one with nothing between the player and the first round. Subway Surfers is a good illustration of how far that has come. The endless runner is one of the most recognisable mobile games in the world, with a mobile app downloaded billions of times, yet the same game has run straight in a web browser, with no install and no account, on the platform Poki since 2018.
For a Scottish sector explicitly chasing global reach, that distribution route is worth understanding. The web does not care where a studio is based. A compact, well-made game built in Dundee or Glasgow can find players anywhere the moment it goes live, without the user-acquisition costs and platform fees that make the app stores a harder road for a small team.
Where Scotland's advantage lies
The £1 billion figure is an ambition and the sector still faces the pressures it always has, from international competition for talent to the pull of larger studios elsewhere. But Scotland's underlying assets are unusually well suited to a market that is spreading across more platforms rather than consolidating on one. The country that gave the world Grand Theft Auto has never had much trouble reading where games are heading.