What the UKIE 2026 ‘Census’ Tells Us About the UK Games Industry

We attended the 2026 launch presentation of Ukie's latest Census, renamed for ‘26 as the ‘UK Games Industry Workforce Demographics Survey 2025.’ The results paint a picture of an industry that is more diverse than the UK workforce at large — but one still working through the aftershocks of a tough few years of job losses, and still facing real questions about who gets to progress once they're in the door. So, what stands out?

A workforce that looks different to the wider labour market.

On sexuality, the games industry continues to stand apart from the general population. Around two-thirds of respondents identified as heterosexual or straight — compared with roughly 93% across the UK working population, according to ONS estimates. The largest group among the remaining third is bisexual people, alongside meaningful numbers of gay, lesbian, queer and asexual respondents. Part of this gap reflects the industry's younger age profile — younger people across all sectors are more likely to identify outside of straight/heterosexual — but the scale of the difference, particularly for bisexual respondents, goes beyond what age alone would explain.

Neurodivergence is another area where games stands apart. 27% of respondents said they have a condition affecting concentration, such as ADHD, and 16% said they are autistic — both notably higher than general population estimates (around 12% and 1% respectively), and up again since Ukie's 2022 findings. Roughly 8% reported a learning difficulty such as dyslexia, and 3% a condition affecting coordination, such as dyspraxia. Rather than reading this purely as a rising prevalence, it's worth taking on board the more optimistic explanation offered in the presentation: people working in games are increasingly aware of, and able to name, their own neurodivergent traits — visibility going up, not necessarily incidence.

On ethnicity, 88% of respondents are white, against 82% of the UK working population — with the gap most pronounced for Black respondents, who make up around 1% of survey respondents compared with roughly 5.5% of the UK workforce. One further wrinkle: the proportion of respondents identifying as white but not white British has fallen four percentage points since 2021 — a shift closely tied to nationality, particularly EU nationals, and a possible early signal of the effects of tighter post-Brexit mobility.

Diversity thins out the higher you climb.

Perhaps the most important finding in the Census isn't a headline diversity number — it's what happens to those numbers as you move up the career ladder.

Across ethnicity, nationality, gender and sexuality, the pattern repeats: junior roles are meaningfully more diverse than senior ones, and senior leadership is the least diverse tier of all. Senior leadership skews 70–73% male, similar to lead roles, while junior and mid-level positions show much stronger representation of women and non-binary people. More than half of people in junior roles selected a sexuality other than straight, falling to around 15% in senior leadership at large studios — still well above the general population, but a steep drop-off nonetheless.

Ethnicity tells a slightly more nuanced story. Ethnic minorities are well represented in junior roles but under-represented in senior ones — though the gap between junior and mid-level representation has narrowed. On promotion specifically, there's a genuinely encouraging shift since 2021: ethnic minorities are still somewhat less likely than white colleagues to be promoted within an organisation, but the previous gap in "diagonal moves" (switching employer to move up a level) has closed. In 2021, ethnic minorities were more likely to be making diagonal moves than white colleagues — arguably because internal promotion routes weren't working for them. That gap has now disappeared, which reads as double-edged: progress, but only in one specific pathway.

One nuance worth calling out on nationality: junior representation of EU/EEA nationals is unusually low (11%, versus 18-19% in mid and senior roles) — a plausible signature of a games industry entry route into the UK that was straightforward a decade ago and has since become far harder to access.

The scale of job losses — and who bore the brunt.

Among respondents, 63% said they had left a job in games within the last three years. Some of that is healthy churn — 15% left voluntarily for a new role, often a step up or a better fit. The more concerning figure is the roughly 22% who experienced a job loss they likely didn't choose: redundancy, a workplace closure, or a fixed-term contract that wasn't renewed.

Recovery time varied widely. About half of those affected found a new role within three months. For the other half it took longer — 9% waited more than a year, and 10% said the question didn't apply to them (some freelance, some still out of the industry entirely).

Job loss and intent-to-leave were not evenly distributed. White British respondents were less likely to have lost a job and less likely to be looking to leave the industry; people from other white ethnic backgrounds and ethnic minorities were more likely to report both. The same pattern held for nationality (those from outside the UK/EU/EEA more likely to have lost a job; EU/EEA nationals more likely to be planning to leave), for gender (job loss and intent to leave rising from men to women to non-binary respondents), and for sexuality and trans status (straight and cis respondents reporting lower rates of both, though trans respondents were no more likely than cis colleagues to be planning to leave despite higher job loss rates).

Sentiment: better locally than industry-wide.

Despite everything above, sentiment toward individual employers remains fairly strong — 80% of respondents said they're proud to tell others where they work, and 70% would recommend their employer as a great place to work. Confidence drops sharply when the question is about the industry as a whole: only 38% would recommend the UK games industry more broadly as a great place to work right now. That gap between "my studio is fine" and "the industry is in a good place" is arguably the most telling attitudinal finding in the whole report.

From data to action.

The presentation paired the findings with a set of practical recommendations for studios, focused on rebuilding trust and psychological safety after a turbulent few years:

• Rebuild trust through transparency — clear communication of long-term strategy, open channels between staff and senior leadership, and closing the loop on feedback with named accountability.

• Establish and live your values — define them, and hold every level of the organisation to them.

• Support well-being and psychological safety — including via specialist charities offering free training and one-to-one support.

• Make progression fair and visible — strengthen performance management so career paths are clear, and track how opportunities are assigned to counter unconscious bias in who gets put forward.

On the industry-wide side, Ukie's Raise the Game programme is expanding its response: relaunching the Poke and Play meetups in partnership with Poke and Play and Melanin Gamers, and building new outreach resources aimed at young people from marginalised ethnic backgrounds to demystify the path into a games career, while increasing support for its strategic partners such as Out Making Games.

So, what is our takeaway?

The UK games industry remains a genuinely diverse place to start a career — more so than the wider UK workforce on nearly every measure. The harder truth is that diversity doesn't hold as people move up, and the last three years of job losses have not been evenly shared. The direction of travel on some metrics (like diagonal promotion moves for ethnic minorities) is genuinely positive. On others — particularly who reaches senior leadership, and who bore the brunt of redundancies — there's clearly more work to do.

The full 63-page report is available at ukie.org.uk/raisethegame.

Source: Ukie 2026 Census presentation.