The Europeans – including myself, Scottish and Irish gamers – in the H faction are waking up for the raids. Our US buddies comprise just under half the team. They’re asleep. If we don’t spend the next 12 hours working together, we will tumble down the world rankings, which in turn affects our ability to survive this murderous landscape. Later, the US side picks up the slack. The cycle continues … until every zombie is dead.
It’s true, The Walking Dead: Road to Survival isn’t a title about Iain Duncan Smith’s late career renaissance, and zombies perhaps aren’t the best analogy for EU campaigners on either side, but in any discussion of Brexit, interactive entertainment is entirely relevant. If we leave the EU, it’s game over for our industry.
Take employment. There are plenty of games graduates saddled with debt in order to build a quality portfolio and obtain the correct spread of knowledge. But as someone who works at a company receiving 20 CVs a week outside of advertised vacancies, close comparisons show that too many homegrown candidates aren’t as well-equipped as their European counterparts for the jobs they want. Cherrypicking from Europe and its economic area is normal business practice for plugging gaps in the talent pool, especially for experienced programmers. These positions are notoriously difficult to fill, and are vital to an industry worth over £4bn. Had incentivised scholarships, accessible tuition fees and reformed computer science courses been in place five years ago, the landscape might look different today.
For developers who build alone, or make up the 95% of micro and small businesses in the UK games scene, attaining even seed funding from their home turf proves incredibly difficult. Match funding can be a little easier to achieve. Creative Europe, as well as funding British films and high-end television content, supports the best pitches from independent developers for the costs involved in making a game if they can demonstrate high-growth potential.
For other developers, the game might be ready but the business skills are not. Local growth hubs and various UK Trade and Investment export initiatives provide fledgling independent developers with advice, mentoring and travel grants that are provided by the regional growth fund and the European regional development fund. Lots of developers enjoying San Francisco’s Game Developers Conference are only there because of help from Europe.
The ERDF also funds Creative England, whose GamesLab grants new developers up to £25,000 each where there is little private investment, as well as providing access to key relationships with the games platforms that really matter, PlayStation and Xbox – the duo that has a stranglehold on the European console market. Those who don’t excel in the boardroom, yet breeze through the Unreal Engine, are given a much-needed opportunity to compete and succeed with their original ideas.
[“Source-theguardian”]
