A global games services company offering art, game development, audio, localisation, testing and player support, with UK studios including Climax in Portsmouth.
Keywords Studios provides services to games companies. A reference page lists seven areas: art, engineering, functional testing, audio recording, translation, localisation and player support. In short, it helps studios and publishers get games finished and ready for players around the world.
It was founded in 1998 by Giorgio Guastalla and Teresa Luppino as Keywords International in Dublin, providing localisation for business software, and moved into games from 2004. Andrew Day, who became chief executive in 2009, set out to be a "one-stop shop" for game development suppliers. Its own press release says it wants to be the "go-to" technical and creative services platform for video games.
The UK is part of the group. Keywords Studios plc was incorporated in the United Kingdom in 2013. In 2021 it bought Climax Studios, a Portsmouth game developer founded in 1988, which had 109 staff and had worked on titles such as Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Crackdown 3 and Returnal. Keywords said Portsmouth gave it "a new pool of talent". A jobs site lists Brighton as a location and shows UK remote roles such as live captioning project managers and captioners.
The company has acquired more than 70 businesses since 2014, so its UK work sits inside a very international group of artists, engineers, testers, translators and audio specialists. A reference page reported 12,340 employees in 2023.
We did not find culture or values wording on the pages we read, so there is little to say about day-to-day working life. Keywords' own page for Climax says the studio was founded in Portsmouth and has further studios in Liverpool, London and Edinburgh. It describes Climax as an award-winning AAA co-development studio offering animation, 3D characters, props and environments, UX/UI, VFX and lighting, plus co-development, porting and remastering. The page highlights a PC port of Returnal for Sony. It does not describe the team beyond calling them talented, passionate developers. The group's headcount grew from about 50 in 2009 and 120 at its 2013 flotation to 2,600 by the end of 2016, helped by a 2017 acquisition that added around 1,300 people, and its other early offices were in Rome, Tokyo, Montreal and Seattle.
Website: www.keywordsstudios.com
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