UK Games Industry Plays 24 Hours of Football for Charity, Raising Over £63,000
UK video game charity SpecialEffect raised more than £63,000 through its One Big Game event — a 24-hour continuous football match played by 24 teams from across the games industry.
The event, held on 13–14 August 2026 at St George's Park, England's national football training base, saw studios and publishers take to the pitch in a non-stop relay. Each team played its slot before handing over to the next, keeping the match alive around the clock. The 2026 edition was themed "TOTAL football," a nod to the flowing, position-fluid style pioneered in the 1970s — fitting for a relay format where no single squad stays on for long. Eurogamer
SpecialEffect uses the money to provide games access for physically disabled people. That means specially made hardware — custom controllers, eye-gaze tools that let players navigate games with their eyes, and other adapted technology — so that disability is not a barrier to playing. The charity has run One Big Game and similar fundraising events for years. Its 2023 edition, held on 5 May of that year, raised £30,000. This year's total more than doubled that figure. SpecialEffect
The matches themselves carried a competitive edge, even if the cause came first. Activision fell 2–3 to EA. Xbox's team, "Score more with Xbox," lost 1–2 to Jagex — the Cambridge-based studio behind the long-running MMO RuneScape. Maverick + Friends, a studio founded by former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida, faced a group drawn from Playground Games and Rare, two of Microsoft's first-party studios under Xbox Game Studios. Eurogamer
A separate raffle fundraiser running during the event had raised £1,392 of a £2,400 target from 105 supporters as of 13 August. JustGiving
For anyone who missed the live action, the full event is available as video-on-demand on SpecialEffect's official Twitch channel. Eurogamer
What makes this stand out is the way the games industry's biggest competitors share a pitch for a shared cause. Activision and EA — publishers of rival shooter franchises — lined up against each other. Xbox-owned studios played alongside independent ones. The 24-hour format means rivalries are brief by design, and the scoreboard is not really the point. The point is that a custom controller, built with the money raised here, can be the thing that lets someone play a game for the first time.
