This article was originally published on April 24, 2026 - read the full issue

By Patrick Garratt

Michael French has spent the past decade building London Games Festival into one of the world's leading videogame events. After last week's show, which brought with it what he calls a genuine step change, he tells us why new government funding matters, what the Finance Market and New Game Plus are revealing about the industry, and why he's pushing to get everything under one roof next year.

The morning after

The morning-after feeling from a festival you've spent ten years building is not always straightforward. This year, however, the director of London Games Festival and head of Games London has woken up with a relatively clear head.

"This year felt like a step change, a step up for us," he says. "It also felt like ten years of hard work had paid off. And the industry really showed up this time, more than ever."

LGF is now, indubitably, a "real thing". The 2026 edition saw over 100,000 attendees, a record £247 million of potential finance on the table at the Games Finance Market, and the debut of Games For Change in the UK. Software showcase New Game Plus, only in its second year, is already outgrowing its venue. The headline, though, was new government backing, a £1.5 million, three-year commitment alongside the doubling of the UK Games Fund to £28.5 million.

While champagne corks may have popped over the new Labour money last week, French is careful to situate it within a longer dialogue.

"I've had a great relationship with DCMS since we started," he says. "I'd always pushed and said, 'I know what you do for film, for fashion, for design – where's our turn?' But you have to wait for these things to happen."

British eyes on Sandfall's success

The political framing around the package – "the next Grand Theft Auto", the language of jobs and economic growth – is the kind of thing that can grate on developers who understand how difficult and contingent game-making actually is, especially given the current climate of precarity and job losses. French is sympathetic to that tension, but he sees the government's ambition as legitimate.

French studio Sandfall Interactive's blinding success with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was clearly a loud signal for the UK government that the time was now.

"A small French team comes up with a breakthrough hit, wins multiple awards, and they're instantly a hot property," says French. "I had a request from somebody in another organisation just this morning: 'Do you know Sandfall? Can you introduce me?' And what's interesting is that in France it becomes a cultural moment and the whole team immediately gets knighthoods."

His point is not that the UK fails to produce equivalent hits. It does. The question is whether the infrastructure exists to celebrate them, scale them, and replicate the conditions that make them possible.

"The UK creates loads of those similar hits every year, or every couple of years. How can we keep doing the same? There's an element where the government says 'growth', and we have to be a bit more proud of what we're creating and find ways to scale it."

The Games Fund's expanded prototype and new IP budgets are where that aspiration becomes concrete. "Maybe the minister can come to LGF in 2028 and say: 'This game came through the Games Fund, it was applied for in 2026, and it became a massive success.' Those are the things we're trying to encourage more of."

Finance Market, New Game Plus: a maturing event

Funding, then, forms a large part of LGF's focus. The Finance Market, the festival's investment event, expanded its scope this year beyond the traditional studio-pitches-to-investor format, adding co-development tracks and a self-publishing day. Both additions came directly from feedback. Attendees had previously told the LGF team they were attending not just to pitch a game, but to pitch their business as a service to other developers.

Others said they had been turned down too many times by publishers and were going it alone, but needed the knowledge infrastructure to do so effectively. A self-publishing toolkit was created over the past year in consultation with studios and specialists, giving advice on how to release a game without a traditional publisher, but French and his team wanted to go further.

"The self-publishing day was really successful," he says. "We launched the toolkit, but we also had sessions the toolkit hadn't been able to include, like a moment where people put their Steam pages on screen and had experts tear them apart. That sort of knowledge is institutional, trapped in the industry, and not written out anywhere."

The result was a room that contained, simultaneously, a session on self-publishing strategy and 45 investors next door taking pitch meetings, with some attendees listening to talks, speaking themselves and then pitching to investors.

"That's how nimble you have to be in business for games," says French.

New Game Plus, a software showcase for developers and publishers, presented a different kind of challenge. The event, which launched in 2025 after the closure of WASD left a public-facing gap in the festival programme, still found itself full this year despite moving to the larger venue of Exhibition White City. This year's iteration, which hosted the first Edge In Person, featuring 22cans' Peter Molyneux, featured around 100 playable games, Devolver and Double Fine alongside tiny experimental studios, and even an Apple talk. Showing a game here has had a real impact for exhibitors. "We're already hearing great responses on wishlist numbers," French says. "That's a really good indicator for us."

The range of exhibitors, from publishers with global profiles down to teams of two or three, is deliberate. "Those indie and experimental games are the ones where you might see a cut-through surprise hit," French says. "They're the companies that can do with that extra bit of exposure."

"You're gonna need a bigger boat"

The question of what comes next year has a straightforward answer, even if the details are not yet confirmed. The venue French has in mind – which he can't name yet because the contract remains unsigned – would bring New Game Plus and the Finance Market together under a single roof for the first time: "That solves some of the issues around people saying, 'I'm at both events and they're on different sides of the city.'"

And beyond the logistics, there's a cultural ambition that the new funding is beginning to make real. For example, Alex Garland is currently shooting his Elden Ring movie adaptation in the UK. "I'd love to get him along in future years," French says. "People of that calibre who've grown up with games – they're the sort of people we want to platform and champion, to help that conversation keep happening culturally."

Ten years in, with a government finally willing to act and a venue deal that will reshape the festival's physical footprint, LGF is no longer just waiting for that conversation: it's making it happen.

This article was originally published on April 24, 2026 - read the full issue