Playhubs at Somerset House in London.
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London’s Playhubs game startup accelerator goes free-to-play

The creators of London game startup accelerator Playhubs have decided to focus their efforts on studios using an interesting business model: free-to-play.

Playhubs recently debuted at the sprawling Somerset House in central London by David Gardner, Paul Heydon, Chris Lee, David Lau-Kee, and Nisha Valand. Its nonprofit mission is to help game companies get off the ground and to provide a low-cost co-working space for some of the region’s small but promising game startups. For those studios, the free-to-play business model has been taking over, where players can play a mobile or online game for free and then pay real money for virtual items.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.