London Game Developer Meeting

I recently moved to London from Seattle, and before that I was living in Boston. When I was living in the states, I noticed almost every major city has a monthly gamed developers gathering and I was wondering if anyone here knew of anything like that for London?

I know that the IGDA chapter here is going through “reorganization”, and that could mean many things, but in Boston I was a regular attendee at the Boston Post Mortem where they had speakers and panels and sponsored events with free food and beer. It was a great opportunity for the large companies in the area to network with the smaller studios and for the game developers could mingle with the students and people interested in breaking into the industry could meet with the people hiring. It was free to all, and all sorts of people came to this monthly event, from game programmers to producers and recruiters and game artists alike would all flock to this pub once a month to talk about all things game related while sitting back and enjoying a beer or two with their colleagues from all the various studios in the area. Heck, even the media showed up to report on the state of the games industry from these monthly meetings because it was one of those rare chances to see all levels of people in the games industry sit down and talk casually about, well, anything really.

If something like that does not exist, any interest in getting something started?

 

There is the London chapter....they've arranged a few meets recently and have done for the last few months and seems to have really picked up the pace.

 

We're having fairly regular meetings at the moment. Unfortunately we missed out this month due to scheduling problems. But our next event should hopefully be next month. If you sign up to our mailing list or Facebook group we'll make sure you get an invite.

 

As you're new here you probably haven't seen the mammoth IGDA thread in the "Industry Professionals" forum. I'm not sure it's worth wading through but it might help in understanding why IGDA has such a poor rep generally outside of the few busy chapters in the US.

 

Hey Paul, good to see your on here as well!

I didn't think the London IGDA chapter had a bad rep, but I've been to a couple cities in the states where the IGDA chapter was "restructuring" and have been doing so for years without any success. Seattle Sputnik chapter was almost completely abandoned, and then two other monthly meetings took its place that weren't connected to the IGDA. Just two other developer meetings, one for the east side and one for the west side(although, I only ever attended the East Side Industry Night, organized by Bob Berry). Lately the Seattle IGDA chapter has been up to something, but I'm not in the loop on that.

I haven't been given full access to the forums yet since I am new here. I need someone to vouch for me.

 

Right. Now I see who you are I've vouched for you.

It's not the chapters that have a bad rep, so much as the leadership. But you'll see the full horror story when you're approved. I'm sure it'll give us plenty to talk about next week.

 

Hey,

I have read up on both sides of the story there, and to be honest it does seem like a witch hunt/smear campaign. IMO both sides are in the wrong. How about we let the lawyers do their job? After all, that's what we pay them their insane salaries for!

However, I better not derail my own thread...

I signed up for the chapter newsletter, but I am curious, where did you have the last meeting?