Try GOLD - Free
Capital ideas
Edge UK
|April 2025
As it reaches its tenth anniversary, London Games Festival is expanding its horizons
-

Make London the games capital of the world. This was the brief that Michael French was handed by City Hall when he joined Film London in 2015, to set up its videogame division. Since then, his primary responsibility has been the annual London Games Festival, a sprawling week-long affair that spans BAFTA's Games Awards, public exhibits in Trafalgar Square and experimental art-game showcase Now Play This. (And, once upon a time, EGX Rezzed and its successor WASD, before the latter's organiser went into liquidation in 2024.) Across April 2-13, London Games Festival is returning for its tenth edition (it has not missed a year, and even carried on during the pandemic). To mark the milestone it is launching New Game Plus, a 'boutique games expo' stepping into the gap left by WASD. We catch up with French during the festival preparations to find out: after a decade as the head of Games London, how well does he feel he's fulfilled that brief? "London is already the games capital of Europe," he says. "It's become that over the last ten years." Indeed, according to industry trade body UKIE's Gamesmap resource, there are currently 708 active game companies in Greater London and that's not counting the nearby development hubs of Guildford and Brighton. But while LGF brought in a record 100,000 attendees last year, French is the first to admit that the event doesn't quite reflect its home city's position on the global stage: "It's a strange thing, right? London is the games capital of Europe in [terms of] workforce, but our festival is not at the same scale as a Gamescom. And we do ask ourselves, why is that?”
This story is from the April 2025 edition of Edge UK.
Subscribe to Magzter GOLD to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
MORE STORIES FROM Edge UK
Edge UK
Titanfall 2
The rise and Titanic fall of the live-service game that wasn't
6 mins
September 2025

Edge UK
Rematch
Rocket League without the wheels — what will they think of next?
4 mins
September 2025
Edge UK
Splitgate 2
The edges have been softened, and it threatens to fade into the omnipresent haze of live-service shooters
4 mins
September 2025

Edge UK
STALKER 2: HEART OF CHORNOBYL
How GSC defied closure, the pandemic and an invasion to realise its most ambitious project
8 mins
September 2025

Edge UK
DIGITAL ECLIPSE
The California company with an expert eye for repackaging game history
7 mins
September 2025

Edge UK
Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour
Like us, we imagine that your first goal on setting up a new console is not to sit and read about its features but to play with them. And yet the first exhibit we land on in Welcome Tour is a series of information boards explaining the ins and outs of Switch 2’s new mouse control, followed by a quiz in which we regurgitate the information just fed to us.
2 mins
September 2025
Edge UK
Mario Kart World
Has the Mushroom Kingdom ever made sense as a coherent world? Certainly that's never been the priority of Nintendo's designers over the previous decades, laying its foundations over various series, genres and generations. So it's a joyous surprise to drive from one end of World's incarnation and discover how natural it all feels to have this place, these places, presented as a single landmass.
6 mins
September 2025

Edge UK
Hitman: World Of Assassination
When your job is bumping off terrible people with too much money and power, you'll never be short of work.
2 mins
September 2025
Edge UK
The Alters
Sometimes your life changes in a moment, and as much as you want to pause time and retrace your steps, the world moves on into the following hours and days, and takes you with it. This is the world builder Jan Dolski finds himself in when he is the only survivor of a crash on a mission to find the world-changing element rapidium. It's his job now to operate the mobile base and return to Earth — and hopefully finish the mission, too. There is no time to lose: come sunrise, the intense radiation will mean game over.
4 mins
September 2025

Edge UK
Date Everything!
Perhaps this is what Marx meant when he talked about the commodity fetish. Date Everything is a game in which you more or less do as the title says. A mysterious benefactor grants you glasses that transform every object in your house, from the microwave to the smoke alarm, into a sort of human being. Then you get to know them and influence them to like, love or hate you. There is an overarching plot, detailing the motives of your benefactor, but you'll spend most of your time talking to objects (and solving a few puzzles in the explorable house).
1 mins
September 2025