EDINBURGH, Scotland & DUNDEE, Scotland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 19, 2025--
Video games leaders have praised Scotland’s role in the global sector as DICE, the annual European video-game conference held by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, came to a close last night in Dundee.
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Supported by the Scottish Government and Scottish Enterprise, DICE Europe opened at the Intercontinental in the heart of Edinburgh with a keynote speech by Mr Satoru Shibata from Nintendo. There were around 200 senior executives from the games industry in attendance at various events throughout the week, including at Edinburgh Castle and V&A Dundee.
Satoru Shibata, Managing Executive Officer, Nintendo, which released Switch 2 earlier this year, said: “As a company, we want to make people smile by providing unique entertainment and a spirit of originality. It is great to be here in Scotland, a country that has a big reputation in video game development, and to have had the opportunity to discuss the road ahead for the industry with peers."
Chris van der Kuyl, Chairman, 4J Studios, developers of Minecraft console edition, who helped to bring DICE to Scotland, said: “When you think about Nintendo’s Switch 2 or the forthcoming release of Rockstar’s GTA 6, which is set to reshape the entire video game landscape, and own new game Reforj alongside all the other incredible output from studios across the country, Scotland is well placed to lead the way and have an outsized impact on the global stage.”
Scotland is home to around 500 gaming studios, employing thousands of creative staff and launching hundreds of new games each year. It was also announced this week that Chris van der Kuyl will be the first chair of Interactive Entertainment Scotland, a new organisation designed to champion the Scottish sector and an offshoot of Ukie, the trade body for the UK’s games and interactive entertainment industry.
Revenue from the worldwide gaming market reached around $200 billion in 2024, with mobile gaming representing around a half of that total, a year in which the advent of AI gathered pace, venture capital investment contracted after a period of record investment, and market dynamics continued to shift following the impact of Covid.
Key themes discussed at DICE included how AI is creating new gaming experiences, bridging the creative-commercial divide, building sustainable studios, and bringing players to the centre of game design and development.
Matthew Short, Partner at Aream & Co, a global investment bank focused on interactive entertainment with offices in London, Berlin, and San Francisco, said: “The gaming market continues to perform well, with players flocking to quality, towards both the well known big blockbuster titles, as well as to the much smaller but highly innovative independents that push the bounds in creativity and game design.”
Matthew Short added: “Players stick around their favoured games for a lot longer than most in the industry initially believed they would. Games are now social communities that provide as much connectivity and engagement as social media had in the past. Overall, the market is more mature, the types of games that get funded are changing but the sector is as innovative, confident and exciting as it has ever been.”
Notes:
4J Studios and Nintendo at Water's Edge, Dundee, Scotland this week (photo by Julie Howden)
CRANS-MONTANA, Switzerland (AP) — Swiss investigators are probing what caused a fire in a bar at an Alpine ski resort that left around 40 people dead and another 115 injured during a New Year's celebration.
Most injuries, many of them serious, occurred when the blaze swept through the crowded bar less than two hours after midnight Thursday in southwestern Switzerland.
The Crans-Montana resort is best known as an international ski and golf venue. Overnight, its crowded Le Constellation bar morphed from a scene of revelry into the site of one of Switzerland’s worst tragedies.
While officials said Thursday it was too early to determine the fire’s cause, investigators have already ruled out the possibility of an attack.
Crans-Montana is less than 5 kilometers (3 miles) from Sierre, Switzerland, where 28 people, including many children, were killed when a bus from Belgium crashed inside a Swiss tunnel in 2012.
Here’s what we know about the deadly fire:
The blaze broke out around 1:30 a.m. Thursday during a holiday celebration inside the Le Constellation bar.
Two women told French broadcaster BFMTV they were inside when they saw a male bartender lifting a female bartender on his shoulders as she held a lit candle in a bottle. The flames spread, collapsing the wooden ceiling, they told the broadcaster.
People frantically tried to escape from the basement nightclub up a narrow flight of stairs and through a narrow door, causing a crowd surge, one of the women said.
A young man at the scene said people smashed windows to escape the fire, some gravely injured, reported BFMTV. He said he saw about 20 people scrambling to get out of the smoke and flames.
Gianni Campolo, a Swiss 19-year-old who was in Crans-Montana on holiday, rushed to the bar to help first responders after receiving a call from a friend who escaped the inferno.
“As we get closer, we see almost dismembered persons lying on the floor, in cardiac arrest. People were also inside trapped, laying on the ground. We saw their clothes melting onto their skin,” Campolo told TF1. “I have seen horror and I don’t know what else would be worse than this.”
The Swiss officials called the blaze an “embrasement généralisé,” a French firefighting term describing how a blaze can trigger the release of combustible gases that can then ignite violently and cause what English-speaking firefighters would call a flashover or a backdraft.
The injured suffered from serious burns and smoke inhalation. Some were flown to specialist hospitals across the country.
Authorities urged people to show caution in the coming days to avoid any accidents that could require the already overwhelmed medical resources.
Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani placed flowers at the memorial in Crans-Montana and said 13 Italian citizens were wounded and six remained missing by midday Friday.
One of the missing was Giovanni Tamburi, whose mother Carla Masielli issued an appeal on Italian state television network RAI for any news about her son and asked the media to show his photo in hopes of identifying him.
“We have called all the hospitals but they don’t give me any news. We don’t know if he’s among the dead. We don’t know if he’s among the missing,” she wailed. “They don’t tell us anything!”
Three of Italy's wounded were transported Thursday from Switzerland to a Milan hospital while a fourth is expected to be transferred Friday, Tajani said.
France's foreign ministry said eight French people are missing and another nine are among the injured. Top-flight French soccer team FC Metz said one of its trainee players, 19-year-old Tahirys Dos Santos, was badly burned and has been transferred by plane to Germany for treatment.
With high-altitude ski runs rising around 3,000 meters (nearly 9,850 feet) in the heart of the Valais region’s snowy peaks and pine forests, Crans-Montana is one of the top venues on the World Cup circuit.
The resort will host the best men’s and women’s downhill racers, including Lindsey Vonn, for their final events before the Milan Cortina Olympics in February.
The town’s Crans-sur-Sierre golf club, down the street from the bar, stages the European Masters each August on a picturesque course.
Dazio reported from Berlin and Leicester reported from Paris. Geir Moulson in Berlin, Graham Dunbar in Geneva and Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed to this report.
Police officers inspect the area where a fire broke out at the Le Constellation bar and lounge leaving people dead and injured, during New Year’s celebration, in Crans-Montana, Swiss Alps, Switzerland, Thursday, Jan. 1, 2026. (Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone via AP)
