From classroom to console: East of England event showcases booming independent games sector

A former teacher who turned her health struggles into a career change has revealed that seven years after being forced out of the classroom, she now earns roughly double her old salary working in the video games industry. Jarvs Tasker, who was only 28 when chronic illness ended her teaching career in 2019, runs Jarvs Indie Insights, an agency providing communications and marketing support to games companies.

Tasker was in Ipswich on Wednesday to mark an event celebrating independent game developers and studios, held at the University of Suffolk's e-sport building. Speaking to BBC journalists, she said her earnings leap had not arrived through seniority but through a leap of scale. Asked whether the games world was paying her well, she said she could "comfortably say" it would probably have taken her something like two decades of classroom teaching to earn what she brings in now.

The route into the sector began with volunteering. On leaving teaching, Tasker started helping out with PlayStation's YouTube channel, and quickly discovered that the skills she had honed managing difficult teenagers transferred remarkably well. Running an online community, she argued, involves much of the same work as running a classroom, and that crossover of abilities gave her an unexpected advantage over people who had entered games from a purely technical background.

Tasker also points to a structural feature of games that differs from many industries: it remains unusually open to people who arrive late in life. And she worries younger people are not always aware of how many different routes exist into it, with marketing, community management, business support and scouting all sitting alongside development work. Her own advice is blunt — the community is powerful and will back people who genuinely care about what they make, but it is also quick to identify those who are in it purely for the money. Passion, she insists, is the thing that matters most.

Artificial intelligence was another theme of the event, and one on which the mood among games professionals was distinctly sceptical. Tasker claimed the industry deserves credit for resisting the push to adopt AI, arguing that audiences have made their preferences clear by disliking it. In her view, the sector should take pride in continuing to champion human creativity, and in having an audience that endorses that stance.

Mark Backler, speaking for Game Anglia — the group that organised Wednesday's showcase — said the UK's games industry is now one of the country's biggest, and acknowledged it is fiercely competitive. But his message was one of encouragement rather than discouragement. It has never been more achievable, he said, for small teams to build and release a game of their own. Drawing a parallel with content creation, he noted that standing out is difficult but genuinely achievable. On AI, Backler was more cautious than Tasker: it remains hard to predict how the technology will reshape the sector, though he confirmed that a substantial number of players are firmly opposed to it.

The strength of the East of England's contribution was underlined by Sam Read-Graves, a developer with Read Graves who works specifically in the region. He said the industry here had "grown massively in the past decade", and he credited a substantial part of that to schemes such as Game Anglia, which spans Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. Those schemes, he argued, have created genuine clusters where large numbers of students sit alongside large numbers of professional developers — a pipeline he hopes will eventually attract studios capable of making the biggest titles.

Read-Graves was careful, however, not to overstate the region's ambitions. Blockbusters of the Call of Duty or FIFA variety, he said, are not going to emerge from the East of England at present, because the area still lacks the large studios needed to produce them. His focus was instead on independents, where he sees no reason why a small team's game could not be financially as significant as a AAA release. That is precisely the segment the Ipswich event was built to spotlight.

A 22-year-old founder offered a different kind of optimism. Abbygale Dunn, who studied game design and programming at university, is the founder and director of Astral Forge, an independent games company based in Essex. She said there is "so much space for women" in the industry now, while acknowledging how daunting the sector can look from the outside. When she began her course, she recalled, there were only around three women on it.

Dunn said the reception she has met has been overwhelmingly positive, and that the industry is far friendlier than its reputation suggests. Pointing to her own background as a programmer — a role she notes is still less common among women — she said she has never once felt out of place. Her message to anyone considering entering games was that the apparent intimidation should not be believed.

The final word came from Omar Khalil, game scout lead at Entity, who conceded there is no shortage of talent in the UK. The harder problem, he said, is turning that talent into a breakout success. With so many good games releasing at any moment, he argued, the real difficulty is not quality but visibility: getting noticed among the crowd. That, he concluded, is the single biggest challenge facing the country's independent developers.

The event, hosted by Game Anglia to promote the rapidly expanding independent games sector across the East of England, brought together developers, founders, marketers and scouts — a cross-section of an industry increasingly offering well-paid second careers to people whose first ambitions lay elsewhere. The report was produced by Zoie O'Brien at the University of Suffolk and Laura Devlin, with additional reporting by Alice Cunningham.