Revisiting European Game Investment Practices: A Policy Perspective

The European game industry represents a fast-growing creative sector with significant cultural and economic potential. Despite this, existing public and private investment frameworks remain poorly aligned with the industry’s specific characteristics, particularly at early stages of development. The EU co-funded Interreg BSR project BSG Go! addresses this misalignment by critically examining prevailing investment practices and identifying pathways towards more effective, sector-appropriate financing models.

Compared to traditional industrial sectors, the computer and video game industry is relatively young and structurally heterogeneous. While investment logics from the technology sector have largely been applied to games, this transfer has only been partially successful. Unlike tech startups, many game companies do not primarily pursue technological innovation but instead operate within a creative production logic comparable to the film or music industries. This structural difference has not been sufficiently reflected in current investment and funding instruments.

As a result, a persistent financing gap exists between early-stage creative support and growth-oriented investment. Public grant schemes tend to prioritise either technological innovation or cultural value creation, while business development and scaling remain underfunded. At the same time, private investors frequently apply tech-sector metrics and risk assessments that fail to capture the production cycles, revenue models, and portfolio dynamics of game development. This combination significantly constrains the ability of young studios to transition from prototype development to sustainable market participation.

BSG Go! explored three complementary, peer-to-peer–based intervention formats to address these challenges. First, targeted exchanges between game investment experts and non-sector investors aimed to improve sector literacy and reduce information asymmetries. Second, closed forums among game-focused investors enabled critical reflection on existing investment practices and the development of alternative models better suited to early-stage game production. Third, structured dialogue formats between private investors and European public investment bodies sought to assess the suitability of emerging public instruments, such as MediaInvest, for the game sector.

The outcomes indicate that peer-based knowledge exchange is an effective mechanism for both market development and policy learning. In particular, investor summits revealed strong demand for adapted investment frameworks and demonstrated the willingness of private actors to engage in coordinated ecosystem building. Policy dialogue formats, while necessarily longer-term in impact, proved essential in identifying misalignments between regulatory instruments and sector realities.

From a policy perspective, these findings underline the need to further differentiate European investment instruments for creative industries and to explicitly recognise games as a hybrid sector situated between culture, technology, and media production. Strengthening the resilience and competitiveness of the European game industry will require coordinated action across funding, investment, and regulatory frameworks. BSG Go! provides initial evidence and practical models to inform this ongoing policy development process.

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