Mediatonic opens Brighton studio

Social mobile games developer Mediatonic has opened a new studio in Brighton.

Expanding away from its London routes, the digital games outfit is looking to hire up to 50 employees for the new branch during the next year, on top of the 50 it already employs in the UK capital, bringing its total headcount to more than 100.

The Brighton studio will focus on the company’s games post-release, adding new features and content to various titles, whilst also advancing its cloud infrastructure and working on analytics.

Mediatonic is hiring for positions such as JavaScript and PHP engineers, product managers, 2D artists, 2D animators, UI designers Flash developers and data analysts.

As well as opening the Brighton studio, Mediatonic CEO Dave Bailey told Develop that given it had a lot customers in Japan and the US, it would probably look at expanding internationally as well.

“We always said that we wouldn’t grow a studio beyond 50 people because we wanted to keep the culture right and we wanted to stop it getting to hierarchal,” said Bailey.

“We got to 50 people faster than we thought we were going to in London so the natural next step for us was to create a new one. The scale of what the business does and the number of capabilities that we have to offer now has increased quite a bit.

"It’s not just about creating great games in the first place anymore, we’ve got big analytics teams, product managers and quite a lot of technical teams and we needed a new place to grow their team.”

Bailey added that Brighton was an attraction in particular because of the abundance of creative and technical talent situated in the area, with the new branch also meaning they could hire staff who didn’t want to make the commute to London.

He said that the studio was also formed to help reinforce what Mediatonic had already been doing, as well as have a dedicated base for the tools and tech side of the business.

“The scale of the projects that we’re working on are ten times bigger than we were working on say two years ago,” said Bailey.

“So this is really about supporting more of what we’re doing already and having dedicated people working on the tech and tool side rather than doing that in a part-time way."

The opening of a Brighton studio follows the developer’s move to a new London office in April earlier this year as Mediatonic expanded its headcount to 50 employees.