Consortium Partners FZCO

Ecosystem Investment

This worksheet outlines sustainable economic development models for the game development industry focused primarily on public programs that operate sustainably via:

  1. Established taxation structures
  2. Co-Investment Return

This worksheet models the economic return on a country’s game-ecosystem investment. Community & Culture returns are near-term SROI; education returns are lifetime NPV GVA discounted to present value; workforce returns are calculated by taxes collected on direct salary increases from workforce programs; and co-investment returns are calculated by taxes collected on direct salary increases and revenue returns.

Country Context

This worksheet compares graduating-cohort size against the country’s sustainable developer population, so a country doesn’t over-train relative to its addressable labor market.

This section determines where the country is today, where they want it to be, and by when. These inputs drive every calculation in the worksheet.

Graduates per Year

Ecosystem Development Programs

Successful emerging gaming ecosystems combine a handful of practical program archetypes. Drag each slider to set the full-operation calendar year for a program — or past your target timeframe to leave it out. Every program has an establishment lead time (setup, hiring, contracting, construction) before it reaches full operation. Worker-consuming programs also auto-gate behind the University Program: Co-Dev and Regional Offices can come online as early as 1 year after University (they recruit seniors directly from the residency pipeline); Publisher no earlier than 2 years; JV / Venture Studio no earlier than 4 years; and Hit-Studio Alumni enter the ecosystem no earlier than 11 years after the University Program begins full operation.

Cumulative Students Trained vs Job Types Created
Two bars per calendar year. Left (students): 1st-year students (diagonal), 2nd-year students (cross-hatch), and cumulative graduates (solid teal). Right (jobs): cumulative jobs created, stacked by program by approx job roles per job type depending on when the programs are started.
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Locked section. Enter the passcode at the top of the page to reveal detailed cost tables, publisher / community / economic modeling, line-item breakdown, and the summary.

Education: Dual Degree

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Year-by-year breakdown for dual-degree program
* Applied only to the incremental wage — the difference between an alumnus’ post-training salary and a pre-training (uneducated) baseline of ~$6K/yr. This measures the fiscal and economic return attributable to the program, not the total earnings of the workforce.
Cumulative Country Contribution vs Government Tax Revenue (2026–2046)
Country Contribution Government Tax Revenue
Residency & Co-Dev Program
Every graduate bridges straight from the classroom into paid production
After graduation, every student enters a residency program with the Industry Partner at their Regional HQ in the Country, working on live commercial projects. All alumni are offered 3 years of employment by the Industry Partner in the Country. An estimated 33% of alumni are then offered full-time positions with the Industry Partner; the rest move into other in-country roles.
Education is financed in roughly a 15:8 ratio. The grant is recoupable through co-development project revenue generated by trained alumni — a revolving capital structure rather than a consumed subsidy — so both sides’ ledgers balance over the full partnership.
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Year-by-year residency + 3-yr employment + 33% retention (NPV)
Active people = current residents + anyone in the 3-year post-grad employment window + retained full-timers (33% of completed alumni). Country and the Industry Partner each carry a share of the training/mentorship overhead in the 13:7 ratio; Country continues matching retained full-timer salaries at the same percentage. All cost / value columns are discounted to present value.
* Applied only to the incremental wage — the difference between an alumnus’ post-training salary and a pre-training (uneducated) baseline of ~$6K/yr. Measures the fiscal and economic return attributable to the program.
Cumulative Country Contribution vs Government Tax Revenue (2026–2046)
Country Contribution Government Tax Revenue

Publisher (Regional HQ Proforma)

To avoid market crashes and to not engineer dependency, we recommend countries approach economic development not as a subsidy but as an investment — with the country recouping its capital like any other investor. Programs that give out subsidies year after year have repeatedly proven unsustainable and ultimately crash the markets they were meant to build. Capital deployed before a market is self-sustainable creates dependency rather than growth. The model below is sustainable and fair to both the country’s tax-paying citizens and the publisher: a stable arrangement where both the company and the country benefit.

Country commits $5M/yr for 10 years to stand up a regional publishing HQ operated by the anchor publisher. The country's capital offsets operating losses during the build phase. Revenue contributes meaningfully from Year 2, EBITDA turns positive around Year 4. Country's economic return = local salaries + local studio royalties + localization wages + tax revenue on local-share of publishing revenue.

Industry-standard assumptions. This worksheet treats the arrangement as a partnership, not a handout. Net project revenue is split 20% to the capital provider (recoupment), 50% to the publisher, and 30% to the developer. Residency stipends and post-graduate salaries are paid at local market rates — with no government top-up beyond market, to avoid creating the kind of salary dependency that collapses ecosystems when the subsidy ends.

Year-by-year Regional HQ proforma
Revenue lines ramp per the publisher's 5-yr proforma and continue growing through Year 10. Country return = local salaries (70% of OpEx) + local studio royalties (100% of Local Studio Publishing) + localization wages (100% of Localization & QA) + tax on local-share of other revenue.
* Applied only to the incremental wage — the difference between an alumnus’ post-training salary and a pre-training (uneducated) baseline of ~$6K/yr. Measures the fiscal and economic return attributable to the program.
40yr Gov Tax from Wage Uplift (OECD-adjusted) *, In-Country Return, Gov Tax on Local Revenue * & Country Investment (2026–2035)
40yr Gov Tax from Wage Uplift * In-Country Return Government Tax Revenue (OECD) * Country Investment

Publisher Run Community & Culture Sponsorships

Corporate sponsorships of non-profit volunteer-driven programs. Return modeled using Social Return on Investment (SROI) methodology.

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Economic Assumptions

Standard input-output & NPV parameters per HM Treasury Green Book and RIMS II methodology.

Line-Item Breakdown

Each program line with its individual return. Useful for board presentations and donor prospectuses.

Promotion of country internationally
Global Game Jam corporate sponsorship
Cost —
Return —
IGDA corporate sponsorship
Cost —
Return —
ESA corporate sponsorship + events
Cost —
Return —
University game program
Tuition (subsidized partnership rate)
Cost —
Return —
Materials, software, admin
Cost —
Return Enables the program — returns captured in tuition line above
Industry adjunct professors
Cost —
Return —
Summary
Yearly spend
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All programs combined
Annual SROI
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Sponsorships, near-term
Lifetime NPV GVA
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Per graduating cohort, 40-yr career, discounted 3.5%
Education NPV ratio
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Lifetime NPV GVA ÷ education spend

How these numbers are calculated

  • Annual SROI (sponsorships): total sponsorship spend × SROI multiplier. Default 3× is conservative within NEF/Arts Council England range of 3–8:1.
  • GVA per graduate per year: local salary × Type II multiplier (default 1.8, per TIGA/DCMS).
  • NPV of a single graduate’s career: annual GVA × annuity factor (1 − (1+r)−N) / r, then multiplied by (1+r)−lag to account for the 4-year in-school delay.
  • Lifetime NPV GVA per cohort: graduates-per-year × NPV per graduate. Shown as a one-cohort, one-year snapshot for apples-to-apples comparison against a single year’s tuition spend.
  • Population benchmark: Finland-tier ecosystems have ~690 game developers per million population (Neogames 2022). Sustainable annual graduating cohort is this ceiling divided by career length.

Residency & 3-year employment — Economic value calculation

Rather than a generic GVA-or-FDI blend, the Residency table’s Economic value column measures the real increase in each alumnus’s market wage from completing the 5-year training, multiplied by the Type II GVA multiplier for flow-through effects to the local economy.

  • Pre-training wage: $500/month = $6,000/yr per person (an untrained junior’s fallback earning power).
  • Post-training market value: $3,500/month = $42,000/yr per person after completing the full 5-year Industry Partner employment.
  • Annual wage uplift per fully-trained alumnus: $42K − $6K = $36,000/yr.
  • Partial-progress credit: training value builds gradually. Each post-grad year contributes k/5 of the full uplift:
    • Year 0 (residency): 0/5 × $36K × GVA-mult = $0 per resident
    • Year 1 employment: 1/5 × $36K × 1.8 = $12,960 per person
    • Year 2: 2/5 × $36K × 1.8 = $25,920
    • Year 3: 3/5 × $36K × 1.8 = $38,880
    • Year 4: 4/5 × $36K × 1.8 = $51,840
    • Year 5 (complete): 5/5 × $36K × 1.8 = $64,800 per alumnus, ongoing
  • Annual total: for each calendar year, sum the per-person uplift across all active cohorts (residents + emp1–5), weighted by their progress fraction.
  • NPV discount: multiply each year’s uplift total by (1+r)−(t−1) to bring all future flows to present-value dollars using the Economic-Assumptions discount rate.

The result is an economically honest answer: each year you see the cumulative wage-lift value that the training program is generating for the local labor market, scaled by GVA multiplier effects on supply-chain and induced spending.

Publisher section — Economic value calculation

The publisher table has two distinct return measures. Local Projects Return is this-year cash flow into the local economy. Economic Value is the capitalized long-term value of the capability uplift that partner studios gain from working with the publisher — the "companies getting better" effect.

  • Annual budget: staff-driven, with a $3M average/yr cap: the publisher section is budgeted for an average of $3M per year over 10 years ($30M total), distributed as:
    • Joint projects = flat $1M/yr (= $10M over 10 yrs) — the publisher's international co-dev commitment, not staff-driven.
    • Training / Residency + Funded local projects envelope = $20M total over 10 years ($2M average/yr) — funded from the remaining budget.
    • Raw staff salary need (residents × $6K + emp yr 1–5 at $12K/$18K/$24K/$30K/$36K each) is calculated from the sine-wave cohort. If the raw total exceeds $20M, every year's Training and Funded lines are scaled down proportionally so they fit the envelope.
    • Industry Partner absorbs (extra staff) = the overflow salary cost that the publisher can't cover — those employees become part of the Industry Partner's co-dev operation rather than the publisher section. This column shows how much the Industry Partner picks up each year.
    • Publisher’s Contribution = Joint + Training + Funded (capped) = total publisher-section spend that year, averaging $3M over the timeframe.
    • The Annual publisher-section budget input auto-updates each recalculation to the actual average spend across the timeframe.
  • Local Salaries: joint projects and training/residency are pure salary activities — their full budget stays local (at the salary-capture rate, default 100%). (joint$ + training$) × salary_capture.
  • Funded Projects Return: funded local projects are shipped through the publisher's distribution network, so they alone receive the publisher lift. Return = funded$ × (salary_capture + (lift − 1) × revenue_capture). Incoming projects assumed at break-even before publishing services, so the full lift is attributable to the partnership.
  • Gross Value (total local-economy inflow): Local Salaries + Funded Projects Return. This is the sum of all cash flowing to the local economy from the publisher section each year.
  • Economic Value (long-term capability uplift, Option C):
    • Joint (co-dev) project local return × Joint-project capability multiplier (default 1.5×) — learning-by-doing lifts the studio's ongoing productivity.
    • Funded local project local return × Funded-project capability multiplier (default 3.0×) — same learning effect plus IP retention (studio owns the catalog) and alumni/founder-network effects.
    • Combined: (joint_return × 1.5×) + (funded_return × 3.0×)
  • Training / Residency budget is kept separate — its downstream economic value is already captured in the Residency & 5-year employment section above (wage-uplift model), so it is not double-counted here.

The capability multipliers are user-adjustable. Higher values reflect more confidence that the ecosystem retains alumni and IP in-country rather than losing them to talent drain. 1.5× / 3.0× is the conservative default; Finland- or Korea-tier ecosystems could reasonably push these to 2× / 4×.