New Zealand game developer revenue climbed 38% year-on-year to NZ$759 million (A$657m) in the period through 2025, nearly double the A$339.1 million Australian studios generated in 2024, per a New Zealand Game Developers Association (NZGDA) survey. Total industry employment sits at 1,418 jobs.

Grinding Gear Games' Path of Exile franchise accounted for NZ$105m of that figure between October 2024 and September 2025; PikPok's catalogue has crossed 500 million downloads across all titles. Hits including Dredge, Abiotic Factor (1.4m+ PC units sold), Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn and Cryptmaster now deliver the kind of commercial validation public funding programs increasingly demand as a precondition.

What role does Code play?

The Centre of Digital Excellence (Code), a government-funded body launched in Dunedin in late 2019, administers training, mentorships and grants to studios nationwide. Its third national funding round disbursed close to NZ$960,000 across 13 teams, with large-scale grants capped at NZ$250,000. In September, minister Shane Reti pledged an additional NZ$2.75m per year.

Code operates alongside NZ On Air's separate Game Development Sector Rebate, which paid NZ$22.4m to 40 companies in 2024/25 at the headline 20% rate.

Vee Pendergrast, development manager at Code, frames the program as a validation bridge for teams without publisher backing. "In this day and age, publishers and investors only want to engage with you when you have already got some degree of validation," Pendergrast says. "We have that baked into the model."

Code estimates that every dollar it spends generates NZ$2.67 of follow-on investment, a ratio the body calculated before Abiotic Factor's PC release and the formation of Dredge spin-off Disc 2 Games. Mentorships run by overseas industry figures, paid at consultancy rates, function as a cheaper substitute for the hires local studios cannot yet afford.

How does the pipeline produce hits?

At October's Pax Australia convention in Melbourne, Code's booth hosted 18 developers including Headlice, time-loop narrative How Was Your Day?, co-op action title Killing Things With Your Friends and Middle Management, an office satire built around a brain-draining octopus. NZGDA currently lists 61 upcoming New Zealand games on Steam, against roughly 19,000 titles released on the platform in 2024.

Nadia Thorne, chief executive and producer at Black Salt Games and a Code mentor since Dredge's launch, says smaller studios would struggle to reach events like Pax without pooled resources. "A lot of indie studios wouldn't be able to afford this kind of exposure," Thorne says. "Pooling all those resources together means that we can come to shows that would be out of reach otherwise."

Adaptory developer Jevon Wright, four years into a 2D survival game about a stranded crew in space, used Code to plug into the wider national scene. The game reaches Steam by end of 2025.

What's the read on the model?

Code's stated objective is to graduate studios off the program. Funding runs from travel grants and kickstart support through to large-scale grants for scaling teams, with explicit mentoring on press outreach, budgeting and console porting. The organization accepts that not every funded title finds an audience; shared post-mortems on what worked and what failed form part of its stated value.

With NZ On Air's rebate scheme due for its next annual review and Code's expanded budget kicking in next year, the test is whether the NZ$2.67-to-NZ$1 leverage ratio holds as more studios graduate onto commercial publisher deals.