UK Game Industry Workforce Shrinks by 9 Percent

Industry site Develop is reporting that the UK’s videogame development workforce has shrunk by 9% since 2008.

Research group Games Investor Consulting found that as companies like Realtime Worlds fail, developers are deciding to work overseasue to being a “highly mobile workforce”.

Rick Gibson, the group’s director, said that “data is hard to gather, but TIGA’s [previous] 2009 survey found that half of studios’ lost jobs went overseas, 72 per cent of them to Canada.”

As an example, former Realtime Worlds dev Luke Halliwell, who published some details of the last days of RTW, moved him and his family to America to work as a software engineer at PDI/Dreamworks.

Countries such as Canada offer extensive tax relief, attracting large development studios such as THQ. The company recently opened a 400-person studio in Montreal and had considered the UK but felt that a  lack of government support held the country back.

In reaction to this news, industry group TIGA today called the lack of tax relief in the UK a contributing factor to the 9% drop. TIGA’s CEO Dr. Richard Wilson said: “Many of our key competitors provide tax breaks for video games production. No such tax breaks for games production exist in the UK. Investment and jobs are drifting away to other countries.”

“TIGA urges the Coalition Government to look again at Games Tax Relief and improve R&D tax credits to help high technology firms including development businesses,” Wilson said.

The government remained resiliant however, after PM David Cameron last week repeated Treasurey claims that tax relief was “poorly targeted”. He repeated such sentiments again on Wednesday, saying: “The steps that we took in the budget were to look at the tax system and try and simplify the corporation tax regime and bring about one of the lowest rates of corporation tax in the developed world.”

“The reform will make Britain, including Scotland, one of the best places in the world to do business,” said Cameron.