The Penarth studio behind it, Wales Interactive, launched the zombie horde shooter back in April 2024 and watched it crack the top 3 on Steam and top 5 on Xbox, with a top 10 finish on PlayStation too. That launch performance cemented Sker Ritual as one of the world’s bestselling PC and console titles at the time, and a genuine success story for Wales.
Off the back of that, Wales Interactive became the first games company to receive Creative Wales Production Funding, using it to build out a new chapter called Tides of Terror: an expansion introducing a fresh map alongside new missions and enemies, plus features such as voice chat, third-person mode, cross-play and custom games. Released in phases over the past year, the expansion culminated in a free trial weekend that pushed Sker Ritual past two million players on its own, taking total downloads across the Sker franchise to 11 million worldwide.
Skybound Entertainment, the studio behind The Walking Dead, has since come on board as publisher, which is the kind of validation a five-person indie team doesn’t get by accident.
Thirteen Welsh games studios and companies travelled to the 40th GDC Festival of Gaming in San Francisco this March, an event expected to draw around 30,000 attendees, with the Welsh Government backing an exhibition stand through Creative Wales and Trade and Invest. The mission’s clearest success story so far is Rocket Science Group.
This year’s delegation included Breaking Change, COPA Gaming, Delta V and Dragon Scale Studios, the last of which brought its in-development title Snuggly Tails to show off. Dragon Scale’s co-founder Jan Pelka put the value of these trips simply, saying the Welsh contingent tends to end up “very much alive, active, and continuing to make cool and mighty things.” Wales’s Creative Minister, Jack Sargeant, framed it as giving the sector a platform on the global stage it’s earned.
What Comes Next
Breaking Change, a Chepstow-based company building simulation and AI-assisted tools that help studios model complex game systems like vehicles, weapons, progression and economies, has secured just over £1 million to push its platform toward market. The package includes £735,000 in equity led by the Development Bank of Wales and investor Haatch, split £350,000 from the Wales Flexible Investment Fund and £285,000 from Haatch, on top of an Innovate UK Growth Catalyst grant, with Saola Ventures and games industry angel Dr Tomas Rawlings also putting money in.
Founder and CEO Dr Jonathan Quinn summed up the problem the platform is solving without much fuss: “Player expectations are rising, but the tools available to studios haven’t kept pace.” His CV includes senior stints at Aardman and Dovetail Games, with Reach Robotics rounding it out, and the funding will let the company expand its team and begin piloting the platform with studios later this year.
None of these three stories overlap directly, and that’s what makes the outlook so particularly strong. A folklore-inspired shooter finding an audience, a government-backed trade delegation actually converting into local jobs, and a tools company solving a problem studios everywhere recognise, all landing in the same handful of months, reads less like a coincidence and more like a sector that’s finally got some depth to it. It’s also worth noting how porous the edges of “games industry” have become: engineers who cut their teeth on rendering pipelines and in-game economies increasingly find a second act building the backend for live casino online platforms, where the same real-time systems and player-engagement skills carry straight across, and a growing Welsh talent pool makes the country a fairly obvious place for that adjacent industry to go looking.