Creative Lead

Like many major employers in the sector, Creative Assembly seems frustrated by the rise of specialist game development degrees which fail to meet its requirements. "We definitely feel that the gaming degrees are just too broad," Heaton says. "We're just not seeing strong applicants from the specialist degrees - instead, we tend to go after engineering degrees, or whatever is more appropriate, more direct."

In order to counteract that problem - and perhaps, in part, to try to get to quality candidates before they can be lured abroad to Canada or elsewhere - the company has established relationships with universities across London and the South East. Staff members, often graduates of the universities involved, are sent out to give talks, and an internship program has been established which the company may expand if it proves to be successful.

"We have a coterie of universities that we talk to on a regular basis, and we send people out to them," confirms Heaton. "It's a transition, I think - in the past, talking to the public was seen as giving away secrets, but nowadays we know that we need to share much more than we used to, through talks at universities and so on."

There are bright spots on the recruitment front, too. Heaton says that they've seen a number of applications from experienced British staff presently working abroad who want to return to the UK, suggesting that a reversal of the "brain drain" of previous years is possible. Moreover, there's no doubt that the sector is now capable of attracting a far higher class of graduate.

"Employers like Google and so on are absolutely the people that we're competing with for staff," Heaton says, going on to argue that the industry as a whole needs to raise its profile as an employer. "Sometimes it's good, away from the specialist degrees, to just turn up and let people know that there are careers out here in games. Huge numbers of these people are interested in games - they just need to be reminded that there's an industry here."

That, Heaton says, is a challenge for the wider industry - one that leads into a much broader debate around the extent of the work being done by publishers, developers, trade bodies and the media alike to champion games as a British success story. For Creative Assembly, the immediate challenges are more down to earth. "We're just the factory here," Heaton says with a grin. "We're creating games." With the Total War team hard at work on the eagerly anticipated Shogun 2, and the firm's console team continuing to take shape, Creative Assembly's factory looks set to be a lynchpin of Sega's Western strategy for years to come.