From classroom to console: Suffolk event spotlights East of England's indie game boom

A former secondary school teacher who was forced out of the profession by chronic illness at the age of 28 has rebuilt her career in video games — and now earns roughly twice her old annual salary. Jarvs Tasker, who left teaching in 2019, runs Jarvs Indie Insights, a communications and marketing consultancy serving the gaming sector, and returned to Suffolk this week to champion the region's fast-growing independent developer community.

Tasker, now 35, travelled from her home in Exeter to the University of Suffolk's e-sport building in Ipswich, where she joined an event hosted by Game Anglia celebrating independent studios and the wider East of England games scene. Speaking to BBC News at the gathering, she said the comparison with her previous career was stark: on her current earnings, it would probably have taken her about two decades of teaching to earn the same money she now makes in a single year in games.

Her route into the industry was not a conventional one. On leaving the classroom, she began volunteering for PlayStation's YouTube channel, a step that quickly revealed how much overlap exists between the two sectors. Managing an online fan community, she observed, requires many of the same skills as managing a classroom of children — patience, communication and the ability to hold people's attention. She also noted that games is one of the few industries where people routinely arrive later in life, rather than straight out of school or university.

That is part of the message she is trying to push to younger audiences. Tasker believes many young people have no idea how many different career pathways exist within gaming, from development and programming to marketing, community management, scouting and business support. The games community, she said, has a strong culture of rallying around people who genuinely care about their work — but it is equally quick to spot those treating it purely as a money-making opportunity. In her view, passion matters more than anything else.

Asked about the rise of artificial intelligence, Tasker was notably sceptical of its adoption. She claimed the industry has done "a really great job" of keeping AI at arm's length because audiences largely disliked early experiments, and said she is proud that games continue to champion human creativity. Her view was echoed by other speakers at the event, who acknowledged that while the direction of AI's impact on their sector remains unclear, significant numbers of players are opposed to its use.

Mark Backler of Game Anglia, the organisation raising awareness of careers across the games industry, said gaming is now one of the biggest industries in the UK. He cautioned that the sector remains fiercely competitive, but argued it has never been more possible for small teams to build and release their own games. The comparison he drew was with content creation: standing out is difficult, he said, but it is genuinely achievable for those willing to put in the work.

Regional clusters are central to that growth, according to developer Sam Read-Graves, who works specifically in the East. He said the industry has "grown massively in the past 10 years", a trajectory he credits to schemes such as Game Anglia, which spans Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. Those programmes, he argued, have brought together large concentrations of students and developers, creating clusters from which larger studios are increasingly likely to emerge.

Read-Graves was candid about the limits of the region's ambitions, however. Blockbuster titles such as Call of Duty or FIFA are not currently coming out of the East of England, he said, simply because the area lacks the kind of big studios capable of producing them. But for independent developers, he sees no reason such games could not be financially comparable in scale — a point that sits comfortably with Game Anglia's showcase format.

The event also highlighted a broadening of the workforce. Abbygale Dunn, 22, is founder and director of Astral Forge, an independent game development company based in Essex. She said there is "so much space for women" in the industry now, though she recalled that when she began her course there were only around three women studying alongside her. Reassuringly, she found the atmosphere welcoming: "As a programmer myself, which is more rare for women to be in, I've never felt out of place."

Attention then turned to the harder commercial question of breakout success. Omar Khalil, game scout lead at Entity, said there is "no shortage of talent in the UK", but insisted that producing the next big game is difficult. The challenge, he explained, is not a shortage of quality releases — there are plenty of good games being made — but visibility. With so many titles competing for attention, he argued, standing out remains the central obstacle for independent studios in the region and beyond.

Taken together, the speakers painted a picture of a sector that is expanding rapidly outside the traditional hubs of London and the south-west, with the East of England building a genuine independent scene of its own. The common thread running through the event was that raw talent is abundant, pathways are wider than most young people realise, and the main barriers to success are visibility and persistence rather than ability.

Additional reporting by Alice Cunningham. Photographs by John Fairhall/BBC.