Independent editorial · UK indie gamedev
The studios, the offices, the people behind the games — covered honestly.
Making Games Is Fun is a third-person editorial on indie game development in the UK and Europe. The focus stays where the interesting work happens: small studios, founder culture, GamesCom corridors, and the unglamorous reality of shipping software that has to feel good.
What this is
A continuation of a niche, written in the third person.
Scope
UK-rooted, Europe-aware. Studios under fifty people, single-game studios, post-launch teams, and the journalists and photographers who follow them around with a notebook.
Voice
Editorial, not promotional. The site profiles studios; it does not work for them. Coverage is third-person, sourced where possible, and never written as if speaking on a studio's behalf.
What it is not
This is not a reboot of the original MGIF photo-essay project. The name is reused, the editorial mission is new, and the site is independent of Gareth Dutton, Hello Games, or any studio mentioned in coverage.
Cadence
Slow. A small set of cornerstone pieces, edited and re-edited, beats a torrent of news posts. New material when there is something genuinely new to say.
Cornerstone reading
The pieces that anchor the site.
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Studio Profile
Hello Games and the Guildford Indie Studio Tradition
A third-person profile of Hello Games — the Guildford studio behind No Man's Sky — and the longer arc of small-team game development in Surrey.
9 min 04/22/2026 -
Scene Overview
A Guide to UK Indie Game Studios: Clusters, Cultures, and Continuities
An overview of the United Kingdom's independent game development scene by region, with attention to the cluster effects that shape studio formation in Guildford, Brighton, Cambridge, and Scotland.
11 min 04/15/2026 -
Editorial
Inside a Game Studio: What It Actually Looks Like
Most readers picture a game studio as either a sleek Silicon Valley campus or a teenager's bedroom. The reality is more boring, more interesting, and more specific.
9 min 04/08/2026 -
Guide
GamesCom: A Developer Survival Guide for First-Time Attendees
GamesCom is the largest game trade event in Europe and one of the most logistically demanding. This guide covers the structure of the event, what indie developers actually do on the floor, and how to survive the August heat in Cologne.
10 min 04/01/2026 -
Tradition
The Photo-Essay Tradition in Games Journalism
Games journalism has always had a photo-essay tradition that runs parallel to its dominant review and news formats. This piece looks at what the form does, why it persists, and where it currently sits in the industry.
8 min 03/25/2026 -
Studio Profile
Founder Lineage: From Bullfrog to Lionhead to What Comes After
Three generations of Guildford studio closures have produced four generations of successor studios. How UK indie studio lineage actually flows.
10 min 03/18/2026
Coverage grounds
Where the editorial spends its time.
Guildford
Surrey studio cluster. Hello Games, Media Molecule alumni, Lionhead-diaspora teams, and the contractor network that orbits them.
Brighton
Independent capital. The Skies the Limit, Hopoo expats, and the smaller experimental studios working out of Brighton seafront offices.
Cambridge / Guildford corridor
Frontier, Jagex, Ninja Theory in Cambridge; smaller teams threading between them. Long-running studios with strong middleware lineage.
GamesCom & beyond
The trade-show floor, the back rooms, the parallel mainstream of European publishing. Reporting from the corridors, not the keynotes.
Colophon
On the name, on the lineage, on what is not being claimed.
The domain makinggamesisfun.co.uk was originally used by the photo-essay and podcast series Making Games Is Fun, published by Gareth Dutton during the mid-2010s. The original work documented a moment in UK indie game development, most prominently a 2014 photo essay shot at Hello Games in Guildford, and was referenced at the time by IGN, Metro, and the No Man's Sky community.
This site is independent of that project. The original photo essays remain the work of their photographer and are not republished here. The MGIF name is reused under a new editorial mission — third-person reporting on indie studios, written by an editorial team with no continuity, contractual relationship, or implied endorsement from any studio it covers.
Note for readers from the original audience: if you arrived here looking for Gareth Dutton's work, the original photographer's portfolio is the better destination. This site does not host or recreate the original photo essays.