The Field Trip
Once my time at Digital Dragons 2025 was complete, I took a field trip to Katowice, Poland with a few of my fellow game journalists. Why Katowice? Because it’s a videogame city. I’m sure some of the places that come to mind when you think about the videogame industry are San Francisco, LA, Seattle, or Boston, but none of those cities support game development and culture the way that Katowice does.
From Coal to Silicon
In a country filled with ancient cities, Katowice is a relative newcomer. While settlement in the region can trace its roots back to the Middle Ages, it didn’t really become a city until the Industrial Revolution. Coal mining and steel were the primary reasons for its existence, and the city doubled-down on these industries after World War II. However, the city has been remaking itself in the 21st century. The factories are shuttered and the coal mines have been replaced with business parks – well, except for one of them, which has been converted to a museum as a monument to the city’s past. In spite of that touchstone to where’s it been, Katowice is firmly looking towards the future, and it sees gaming as a large part of that future.
The level of support the gaming industry gets in Poland is impressive. I previously reported on how game companies receive support at the national level there, but the support doesn’t end there. Governments at the regional and city level provide support as well. One of those former coal mines that the city of Katowice is converting will be a videogame development complex set to open in 2028. The offices nestled among a open air park will look almost bucolic from the outside, but on the inside it will have all of the infrastructure necessary to run and support high tech videogame development. The city is already home to numerous game companies, but they are actively working to attract even more. If you build it, they will come.
Silesian eSports Hub
If you’re into eSports, you’ve probably heard of ESL and DreamHack. Not only do they regularly host events at Katowice’s “flying saucer”. Spodek Arena, but they run an enormous complex of studios – almost 60,000 ft2 – for use by streamed video game shows and content. The next time you watch an eSports or videogame streamed show, it’s quite possibly coming out of ESL’s Katowice studios, but it will be hard to tell. The high-tech studios green screen everything, even the “desk” the hosts are sitting behind while they bring you gaming news and content is virtual.
Gaming Pipeline
As a part of our Katowice tour we visited a couple of long-established companies that operate out of Katowice. The first was Keywords Studios, and even if you haven’t heard of them, you’ve almost certainly played a game they have worked on. The company provides game localization, development, QA testing, and art services to game companies around the world. They work on so many games, that they need to compartmentalize their work from even themselves. The work that they are doing on each floor of their building is on a need-to-know basis, even for their own employees. NDAs aside, all employees have access to the top two floors of their building which houses a really nice collection of common spaces including a kitchen, game room, and movie theater. And if you need to quickly get back to work, there’s a slide that will get you down faster than the stairs.
Keywords Studios not only provides services to a worldwide base of game company clients, they serve as an incubator for people new to the industry. You’re probably aware that the tried-and-true way to break into the videogame industry is to get a job with QA as a tester. Keywords Studios provides a gateway for new college graduates who want to get into the industry by giving them the opportunity to work on their QA contracts. While you may imagine that game testing at companies like Keywords Studios is like playing betas all day, you’d be wrong about that. The testing is grueling and methodical there, but it provides a great learning experience and gives testers a chance to decide which aspect of game development they want to pursue as a career. And while Keywords Studios has many opportunities to provide a career path to those moving beyond testing, the testers have no obligation to spend their career at Keywords Studios. The recurring theme in the Polish game industry is one of cooperation, and companies there believe that by helping each other, they help everybody.
The next game company on our tour was Anshar Studios. Like Keywords, Anshar Studios also provides development services to other game companies, but in their case Anshar is more focused on ports and remasters. However, Anshar has also developed original IP in the past and is branching out into indie publishing. You will certainly recognize some of the titles they’ve worked on – Baldur’s Gate 3, Divinity: Original Sin 2, and the Painkiller remake. Even if you’re not playing a game from a Polish developer, it’s likely that a Polish company worked on that game at some point.
Videogaming 101
Katowice is ensuring that it continues to grow as a videogame city in the future by bringing its local universities into the game. In the past when I thought about videogames in academics, I imagined that everyone was in a software engineering program. After hearing four local professors speak, I now see that there is far much more to it than that. There is a diversity of programs available that all lead to degrees. Yes, you can still learn software engineering and become a developer when you graduate, but there are also videogame programs in the Universities’ art, music, and design schools. The local game developers work closely with the universities to ensure that newly minted video game degree holders can find a place to work outside of college. You can also pursue a career in videogame academics, studying game design theory, the psychological impact of games, and the ethics of loot boxes or AI players. In Katowice you can even earn a PhD in esports.