There's a lot of reasoning here, and some of it makes sense. But a lot of the time it's just where the founders are from. In the 80s when the home-computer revolution was kicking off, a lot of the kids/young adults that got good at making games and made a fortune off the nascent industry then went off to set up development studios. They were often from the shires, because it was a wealthy/middle-class pursuit, or was at least easier to get going when the family support machine was backing you.
The low pay thing I think is a misnomer, I worked in games from 1995-2005, and although yeah the pay wasn't great compared to other industries, it wasn't bad, and I worked full-time for three different London based studios and contracted for another two. It was certainly enough to live in London (at least then before the property market went crazy)
This is the closest answer. I was there. Codies actually got its start in a small light industrial unit in Banbury, about 20 miles down the road, but when the Darling family bought a run-down farm in Southam we all (well, probably less than 10 people at that point) relocated to some hastily renovated stables there. I don’t think it was ever anticipated to be a huge employment hub. That just sort of happened. We gradually grew a crop of portable buildings out the back to accommodate all the programmers that came to work on special projects as the company moved beyond the budget games market, and a small team of builders were on site for literally years gradually converting outbuildings and improving the house etc. There were no other developers around, save for Archer McLean who coincidentally lived a couple of fields away. The Leamington-centric games dev community all grew out of Codies. I expect that’s a good part of why the boys picked up CBEs a few years ago.
The low pay thing I think is a misnomer, I worked in games from 1995-2005, and although yeah the pay wasn't great compared to other industries, it wasn't bad, and I worked full-time for three different London based studios and contracted for another two. It was certainly enough to live in London (at least then before the property market went crazy)