UK has lost talented developers to Canada

Sports Interactive head Miles Jacobson believes that the UK has lost many talented developers due to the lack of video game tax breaks in the country.

Though a scheme is in its infancy, the UK government has still failed to implement tax breaks for the video games industry. This is despite the UK being the fourth biggest games producer in the world, bringing in £1 billion of revenue into the country every year.

The UK was once ahead of Canada, but has now fallen behind, due to tax breaks that can account for a saving of 37 per cent on a game's production costs being introduced abroad.

Sports Interactive's Miles Jacobson has revealed in a Develop interview that this has caused talented UK developers to leave the country and flock to Canada.

Sports developers in particular have moved to EA Vancouver, who have recently been developing Fifa 10; a game that has many prominent UK developers on its team, including David Rutter, the game's producer.

"Professionally, my interests are focused on sports games and the talent that we’ve lost from the UK in that field has been huge. Utterly huge," said Jacobson.

"We’re very specialist in what we do, and a lot of specialist football game designers have moved to EA Canada."

"FIFA’s a big deal and EA want UK staff, but the UK’s not attractive enough a place to set up a studio in," he added.

Tax relief for the UK video games industry is a much wanted goal, according to Jacobson, and though it's some way off, the industry must work on its PR voice in order to garner more respect.

"Achieving that milestone is massively important," said Jacobson. "If we had tax breaks, we would utilize that spare revenue to try and get back some of those hugely talented people who’ve moved out of the UK to work on Football games in Canada."

"Regardless of what’s going on right now, I think that within the next two decades the games industry will actually be recognized in a culturally similar way as film and music.

"What I hope will happen in that time is that the games industry will learn how to PR itself better than they are right now, where the industry can be treated respectfully on a mass-market scale.

"The film industry is treated in different ways and it’s purely from a PR perspective. If we want to be taken seriously, we’ve got to start PR-ing ourselves properly."

Jacobson's views mirror those spoken by the Conservative's shadow arts and culture minister Ed Vaizey earlier in the year:

"Then you get onto the big landscape issues. Tax breaks is one, which is certainly something I’d be working very hard to achieve. The other is video games being represented at Governmental level. You’ve got the UK Film Council, but you don’t have a UK Video Games Council. That’s something I’d like to remedy," Vaizey said in June 2009.