Keeping teams utilised and operations resilient

One key and perennial pressure for a team like Chris Wood’s Tanglewood Games studio is utilisation. Tanglewood is a service business, providing outsourced engineering and platform porting services to the games industry. The level of utilisation of its employees has a massive impact on their profitability, and is a major challenge given the ongoing uncertainty in the broader games industry. Tanglewood have been able to manage this through occupying a well-defined niche, being the best at what they do, and growing carefully. COO Viktorya Hollings of the studio Just add water reflected on the cyclical nature of the industry, and the importance in challenging periods of protecting the core team to ensure that the studio is well positioned to grow as demand returns.

The panel also reflected on the challenges operating across time zones and cultures, which can be both a blessing and a curse. While operating this way involves provides the ability to provide a service across different time zones, but demands discipline around handovers, communications and wellbeing to be effective.

Navigating a tougher market

The panel acknowledged a difficult industry cycle, with a long period of “evolutionary pressure” forcing industry improve with better discipline, sustainability, and realism on growth and cost. In response to these pressures video game legal teams are sharpening their commercial agility and refocusing on what is important- rebalancing templates, prioritising speed to yes, and trimming friction so that scouts and business development can land deals faster without tripping legal risks.

AI: governance, community sentiment, and workforce impact

On AI, the games publishing industry has moved from blanket bans to cautious, policy guided adoption. Publishers initially put the brakes on use due to unsettled legal risk, only later allowing limited, process oriented experimentation outside core game content. Public relations and community sentiment were flagged as risks on par with legal, with recent backlash around use of AI in localisation and the inclusion of ‘AI slop’ underlines that player communities are vocal and inappropriate AI use can damage a title’s reputation quickly. 

Impacts of AI on job displacement remained a key concern for games executives. Internally, leaders are pushing to embrace AI where it is shown to be an effective productivity boosting tool, but fear and emotion among staff remain real and must be managed with transparency and training. On AI, the in-house legal teams’ role has evolved from gatekeeper to enabler: establishing enterprise licensed tools, secure storage, and practical guidelines to curb “shadow IT,” while freeing time for higher value regulatory and in game content work.