According to Tiga a national trade association representing games developers in the UK and Europe the recent budget is a missed opportunity to help games developers in the UK.
The below are comments in response to the budget by Richard Wilson, CEO of Tiga.
“The 2008 budget contained nothing to help UK games developers enhance their competitiveness in the face of intense global competition. It was particularly disappointing that no provision was made to help offset the impact of massive government subsidies to games developers in competing territories like Canada.”
“Games developers will also be concerned by the budget’s slew of worrying economic statistics, including an increase in the overall tax burden.”
“Despite this disappointing budget, Tiga will continue to encourage the Government to introduce a range of measures that will strengthen UK based games developers, a sector that remains one of the country’s economic pearls. UK games developers are hugely successful in international markets and in the darkening economic climate, game development remains an important source of export income for the UK. The UK is the fourth largest developer of games in the world in terms of revenue generation and the games development sector contributes 30% of the UK’s media exports. The Government must support successful business sectors such as the games development sector if the economy is to continue to grow through these difficult economic times.”
What this means for you? In the short term not much difference. There will still be big movie tie-in titles by Activision and EA. Things like Battlefield: Bad Company will still be released and life will continue. For the future though it will limit the number of games that will be released to just titles that big publishers think will sell larger numbers of copies. This will cut creativity down to a minimum. Who knows, we might even end up with a system much like that in use with television where an idea must be given to a publisher and they have to give all funding to the developer. Its a scary idea for the future but something that will not hit home for quite some time.
