Meet the woman trying to build Israel’s AAA gaming industry
Tali Freeman Shalev's CreaTech is setting out to answer one question: can Israel build a real AAA gaming industry?
Israel has built global leadership in cybersecurity, fintech and enterprise software. In video games, it has built profitable mobile studios and monetization engines. What it has not built is a sustained AAA industry producing large scale, narrative driven titles.
Tali Freeman Shalev believes that gap is structural.
Through CreaTech, the organization she founded at the request of the Israel Innovation Authority, she is attempting to build what she describes as the missing infrastructure: education pipelines, studio capacity, international integration and capital awareness.
“People think that we have a gaming industry in Israel, but we don't,” she said. “In the last five or six years, ‘gaming’ in Israel has meant gambling and Forex and NFTs. But we don’t have real gaming companies here, and we don’t have publishers.”
CreaTech operates across several layers. At its base is Epic Academy, a training program built around Unreal Engine in partnership with Epic’s education ecosystem. The first academy is launching in the south of the country, where a local municipality is financing the first year and providing the space and infrastructure as part of a broader effort to seed development outside central Israel.
“The first three months is the educational part, learning Unreal and getting all the basics,” Freeman Shalev said. “Then we have five months where we match them to real projects.”
She refers to that second stage as a “Scalarator,” placing participants onto active development projects tied to mentors and industry figures involved in the initiative.
Among those attached to the advisory board are world-class game directors Ken Levine and Neil Druckmann. Freeman Shalev said they were approached directly about participating in the ecosystem. “We approached them and we said, if we’re going to open a studio here, will you take part in it? And they said, yeah, of course, because we want to work with Israelis.”
The southern program is also designed as a regional development lever. Many participants are expected to be post-army youth, with the aim of retaining talent in the periphery rather than concentrating it solely in Tel Aviv and its surrounding tech hubs.
A parallel effort is underway in central Israel, where CreaTech is working with a municipality and the Ministry of Education through an existing innovation center. Freeman Shalev’s ambition extends beyond a standalone training course.
“My vision is to start it from school,” she said. “Youth at age 12 or 13 should already start getting those skills. This is the future.”
She envisions a pipeline that extends from secondary education through universities, formalizing gaming as an academic and professional track rather than an extracurricular activity. She also emphasized that these skills should be made available to every demographic in the country.
“Every woman that is Orthodox, or Arab, or Bedouin, or that has no expertise in high tech, can be part of this future employment,” she said.
Education alone does not create an industry. Freeman Shalev argues that Israel lacks the middle layer: studios capable of producing AAA and AA titles, and publishers able to finance and distribute them. Therefore, the second part of her initiative is “to bring brands from abroad.”
CreaTech’s ecosystem initiative, branded GameOn, is intended to attract international delegations, companies and creators. The organization is planning a large-scale convention later this year where Israeli developers will showcase projects and meet foreign studios and investors.
“The idea is that every year we will showcase and do a contest for the best creator and the best game,” she said. “We want to make it a tradition.”
Freeman Shalev also points to a first anchor studio led by Luc Bernard, who is bringing projects and capital to Israel. The broader aim is to create a portfolio of games that can be financed and published without relying on traditional global publishers.
“Luc wants to disrupt the publishing ecosystem, because you can do it today without a publisher,” she said. “This is the way that we want to raise the ecosystem of AAA and AA gaming here.”
She stresses that the objective is commercial sustainability rather than a grant dependent initiative. “I think the success will be to build the ecosystem not as a philanthropic event, but as a commercial ecosystem,” she said.
Her five year benchmark includes locally financed games, active studios operating at AAA and AA levels, venture capital awareness of the sector and measurable employment growth.
Whether Israel’s venture capital market, traditionally optimized for enterprise software and faster returns, can support the long development cycles and capital intensity associated with AAA production remains an open question.
Freeman Shalev argues that technological shifts lower the barrier to entry. Especially thanks to the wide availability of AI tools, “now is exactly the right timing. All the stars are aligned.”
