Spanish Game Developer Fights Stigma: "We Get Less Support Than Smaller Sectors"

Yova Turnes sits at a computer in Santiago de Compostela, working a day job as a systems administrator while spending his evenings and weekends on something that has consumed thirteen years of his life: DeVuego, a comprehensive database documenting every Spanish video game ever made. He does this for no money, sustained by Patreon donations that barely cover the server costs, driven by something closer to obsession than profit motive. His mission is simple and urgent: to prevent Spain's contribution to video game history from disappearing into the fog of collective amnesia.

Turnes discovered the gap he needed to fill almost by accident. In the early 2010s, while writing articles about video games online, he searched for a centralized source tracking Spanish game development—past and present. He found almost nothing. There was plenty of nostalgia about the golden age of Spanish gaming in the 1980s, the era of Dinamic and the eight-bit studios that made Spain briefly famous in the industry. But information about what Spanish developers were actually making in the present moment was scattered, incomplete, or simply absent. In 2013, he built DeVuego to fill that void. Today it functions as a living archive: a searchable database of studios and releases, a job board, a calendar of upcoming launches, maps showing where development clusters exist geographically, and a record of public funding flows. It updates constantly, sometimes hourly.

What Turnes has built through this work is not just a database but a lens. When he published a map of public funding directed to Spanish game studios, it revealed something uncomfortable: Spain invests far less in video games than in other cultural sectors, and far less than in smaller industries with less economic output. The film industry receives tax incentives that dwarf anything offered to gaming. Institutional support is sparse and often poorly designed by people who don't understand how game development actually works—the timelines, the budget requirements, the phases of production that need support. "There are smaller sectors, with less production and fewer employees, that receive many more subsidies," Turnes said. The problem runs deeper than money. It is cultural. Many Spaniards still see video games as toys, not as art or industry. That stigma translates directly into policy.

Turnes traces much of the problem to what he calls institutional ignorance. Government bodies don't understand the medium well enough to support it effectively. They don't grasp that a decent game takes three to four years to develop, or what reasonable budgets look like at different scales. They confuse funding for gaming events or conferences with funding for actual game creation. And they underestimate what Spain's gaming sector could become. The country has proven it can produce world-class indie titles—Blasphemous, Neva, They Are Billions—games that sell millions of copies despite minimal institutional support. These successes happen almost in spite of the system, not because of it.

There is also a structural problem within Spanish game studios themselves. Turnes echoes a point made by other industry figures: Spain lacks a strong entrepreneurial culture. Most studios begin as groups of friends passionate about games but without clear business vision. They don't know how to scale, how to sustain themselves, or where they're headed. The studios that have succeeded internationally almost always have someone inside with real business acumen—someone who understands how to run a company, not just make a game. Without that, even talented teams struggle.

When asked whether Spain could produce another blockbuster—a truly competitive AAA title—Turnes is skeptical. The closest call was Tequila Works, which fell short. MercurySteam remains active but hasn't matched its earlier heights. The international industry itself is struggling with AAA economics now; even the largest publishers are pulling back. For Spain, the realistic near-term goal is not a triple-A superproduction but more studios capable of releasing games that matter internationally. That would be substantial progress.

What Spain needs, in Turnes's view, is threefold: fiscal incentives comparable to those offered film, real infrastructure for entrepreneurs, and institutional knowledge embedded in government from the ground up. Someone in a ministry needs to understand how games are made, what they cost, and why they matter—not just economically but culturally. Until that happens, Spanish developers will keep building world-class games despite their own country's indifference, and Turnes will keep updating his database, documenting a history that Spain itself seems reluctant to claim.