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20 October 2025

Cyber Respawn

By Colin Powell Business Development Manager
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The UK gaming industry continues to boom with developers consistently releasing titles across platforms like Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch and mobile app stores. Whether you’re a solo indie developer or part of a growing studio, your digital world is your livelihood, however, with opportunity comes inevitable risk and one of the biggest threats facing all UK game developers today, whatever your business size, is cybercrime.

In this article we discuss why cyber insurance cover should no longer be considered an optional “nice to have” but a core insurance policy providing protection for you and your business from digital threats.

What is cyber insurance?

Cyber insurance is a specialist type of cover designed to protect your business against the financial and reputational impact of a cyberattack, data breach, or IT system failure.

While professional indemnity and public liability insurance protect against traditional risks, cyber insurance is tailored for the digital threats game developers face every day.

What does cyber insurance do?

A good cyber insurance policy can cover:

  • Data breaches & hacking
    If sensitive customer or player data (such as login details or payment information) is stolen, insurance helps cover investigation costs, legal fees, and will provide compensation where relevant.
  • Ransomware & extortion
    If hackers lock you out of your systems and demand a ransom to release it everything back to you, your policy can cover the costs of any negotiation, file recovery and business interruption too.
  • Downtime & lost revenue
    If your servers go down due to a cyberattack, insurance can reimburse you for lost income during the outage.
  • Third party liability
    If a breach of your systems directly leads to financial loss for a publisher, a platform or a user, you’re protected against legal claims from them.
  • Incident response
    A cyber insurance policy provides you with access to expert IT forensics, legal support, and crisis PR to help you manage the situation quickly and minimise any damage resultant from the hack.

Why is it vital for game developers?

  1. Bluntly put, gaming is a prime target. Games consist of player accounts, personal information, in-game purchases and intellectual property, all valuable to any hacker wanting to profit from criminality. Game developers often face denial-of-service type attacks, theft and ransomware attacks.
  2. Reputation is everything. A single breach can result in bad press, angry players and loss of trust from publishers and distributors. Cyber insurance helps you recover from these setbacks and clearly demonstrates to all stakeholders that you take security seriously.
  3. Platforms expect security. If you’re publishing to major platforms (Steam, PlayStation, Xbox or mobile app stores), you’ll be expected to demonstrate strong business risk management. Having cyber insurance shows professionalism and resilience.
  4. The financial hit can be huge. From regulatory fines (under GDPR for example) to lost sales during downtime, the costs of a cyber incident can cripple any sized studio. Cyber insurance provides you with a safety net.

As a game developer, your coding, IP, brand and your reputation are everything. Cyber insurance ensures that if the worst happens, your studio can survive, recover, and continue creating. If you are reading this article and you are currently operating without cyber insurance in force, please consider it. It could make all the difference to you and your business on multiple levels.

Be Proactive, Not Reactive.

If you would like us to provide you with a cyber insurance quotation, please call today on 0208 256 4949 or send an email to colin.powell@performance-insurance.tv.

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