From classroom to console: Suffolk showcase lifts East of England's independent games boom

A marketing consultant who left teaching behind when chronic illness forced her out of the profession seven years ago now earns roughly double her old annual salary — and she puts the change down to passion, timing and a transferable set of skills. Jarvs Tasker, director and founder of Jarvs Indie Insights, a firm providing communications and marketing support to the games industry, returned to the East of England this week to help celebrate independent developers and studios working across the region. The 35-year-old travelled to the University of Suffolk's e-sport building in Ipswich on Wednesday for an event organised by Game Anglia, a network that promotes careers in gaming and which now runs schemes across Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. Speaking to BBC News, Tasker said the comparison with her former career was stark. She estimated it would have taken her about two decades of classroom teaching to reach the income she now generates from games work. Tasker's route into the sector was not the conventional one. Rather than applying for a job straight away, she began volunteering for PlayStation's YouTube channel, a decision that exposed her to how the industry operates and to how closely the skills of teaching and games marketing overlap. Managing an online community, she argued, requires many of the same abilities as managing a classroom — building trust, setting expectations and keeping a group of people engaged. She also pointed out that video games is one of several industries where people frequently arrive late in life, rather than at the traditional entry age. Now based in Exeter, Tasker said she believes many young people remain unaware of the wide range of pathways open in the sector. In her view, the games community is unusually strong at rewarding genuine enthusiasm, but equally quick to spot people motivated purely by money. Her conclusion was blunt: passion matters more than anything else in a creative industry. That creative argument also underpins her view of artificial intelligence. She believes the games industry has handled the rise of generative AI well, largely because audiences pushed back hard against early attempts to use it. Far from seeing this as a threat to be raced ahead in, she counts it as a point of pride that the sector continues to champion human-made creativity — and that players appear to agree. For Game Anglia's Mark Backler, the significance is less about individual career swings and more about the scale of what has been built. He described gaming as now one of the largest industries in the UK, and said the market remains fiercely competitive. But his message to would-be creators was encouraging: it has never been more achievable to build and release an independent game. The comparison he drew was to content creation, where breaking through is difficult but genuinely possible for anyone prepared to work at it. Backler conceded that predicting AI's long-term impact remains difficult, though he noted that a significant share of players are simply opposed to its use — a sentiment echoed by Tasker and likely to shape how studios in the region approach development. Independent developer Sam Read-Graves, who works specifically in the East, said the sector has expanded dramatically over the past decade. He credited regional schemes such as Game Anglia for creating genuine clusters of students and developers, which in turn have begun attracting studios capable of producing larger-scale titles. He is careful about expectations, however: blockbusters such as Call of Duty or FIFA are unlikely to originate in the East of England in the near term, because the region still lacks major studios. His more realistic claim is that independent releases, built in far smaller teams, can still generate substantial financial returns. That optimism is shared by a younger generation of founders. Abbygale Dunn, 22, founded and directs Astral Forge, an independent game development company based in Essex. She said there is a considerable amount of room for women in the industry and that, contrary to the fears of younger entrants, it is far friendlier than its reputation suggests. Dunn recalled that when she began her course there were only around three women studying alongside her. Working as a programmer, a role she notes is still comparatively unusual for women, she has never felt out of place, and found colleagues consistently supportive. The challenge highlighted by the final speaker is distribution rather than talent. Omar Khalil, game scout lead at Entity, said there is no shortage of ability in the UK, but acknowledged that producing the next breakout title is difficult. His concern is one of visibility: with a huge volume of releases competing for attention, the problem is not a lack of good games but the difficulty of getting any individual title seen. He described that as the single biggest obstacle facing the industry. Taken together, the speakers offered a picture of a regional sector that is still short of household-name studios but rich in small, agile operations and newly trained graduates. The University of Suffolk's hosting of the event underlines how institutions in the region are positioning gaming as a serious employer — and how careers which once looked implausible, as Tasker's teaching-to-games switch demonstrates, are becoming both more visible and more achievable. The event was held with additional reporting by Alice Cunningham and photography by John Fairhall.