Establishing a Perimeter

Theoretically and conceptually, yeah that's something we should be concerned about. I've not seen any data to support it. There's never necessarily been examples where the scheme has been completely pulled out. In the case of Nordic, they're getting reduced funding and they have to operate on a slightly different mandate and so on, but there's been no-one, that I'm aware of, where it's been hard-cut cold turkey down to zero.

But it's definitely one of the criticisms. Oftentimes the timed example is that, you're trying to catalyse things - where you're trying to get things going, on the assumption that, if you push the rock down the hill and let it go, the momentum will be self-sustaining. Canada is actually often criticised for not having a sustainable model with all the tax-breaks. You know, would Canada be doing so well if someone suddenly pulled the funding out from underneath. We can only speculate, but there's such a momentum in Canada it's hard to imagine.

There's also so many other factors in Canada, it's not just the tax-breaks, it may hurt a few companies here and there, but I don't get the impression that the industry would suddenly collapse on itself. But again, using Canada as an example, I think the rock has built up enough momentum to keep going. The Nordic region definitely has a long history of game development, but for many years it was small and young - the Nordic Game Program has really helped to drive and support and foster the community over the whole Nordic region. The question is, has it built up enough momentum where it can stand the reduction in funding.

My sense is that it will do fine. It's going to be a headache for the Nordic Game folks to figure out how to do more with less, but on the whole I think the region will survive. If you think about the indie projects - these indie guys are so cunning and resourceful that they'll still find a way to survive and do what they want to do. I don't know to what extent Mojang got support to develop Minecraft, but I think they just do their own thing. You'll still get that kind of stuff emerging, even if one or two companies feel more pain.

This question of sustainability always comes up, but we haven't really seen a good example of that.

Well you know, look at California. They have forty per cent of the US industry's workforce. There are no incentives there. Do we say that that pooling is cannibalising the rest of the country? I mean, it absolutely is - people are coming from all over the world to work at the awesome companies there. So Canada can also be "blamed" for maybe recreating a bit of that through the incentives and the job creation demand, but my sense is that it's more rhetoric. "Look at Canada and all they've done!" Can we actually look at the people and see how many people actually left and went to Canada? I don't get the sense that it's planes full of UK developers.

So are they stealing those people? I don't know. Maybe, but I don't really know. It'd be interesting to look at those numbers and see what sort of effect it has. I'm much more thinking in a global perspective. Although I may help specific governments grow their industry in their country, I want to see the industry be healthy on a global basis. So personally I don't care if you go from one country to another or not - let's do the things to make your region attractive.

The tax-break issue... It's not about the tax-breaks alone. When I talk about the industry I talk about an eco-system kind of metaphor. It's very dynamic, it's a complex system, there's lots going on, it's not clear that introducing a tax-break is going to be the thing that all of a sudden makes your ecosystem thrive. In fact there are regions where there's nothing - it's a desert. So you say, we have this desert and we'd really like there to be a game industry there because we think it's sexy and good jobs etc. So they look at Canada and say, well, they're doing so well because they have these tax-breaks, let's put a tax-break in our desert.

So they put a tax-break in the desert, and guess what? Nothing happens. Because a tax-break alone isn't enough. Now of course the UK is not a desert and there's a long-standing industry and all kinds of companies and schools and stuff, so a tax-break would have some kind of effect, but the point is that it's not the only thing.

If you look at Canada, there's all kinds of stuff going on. Even if you just look at Montreal - everyone assumes that Montreal succeeded just because of the tax breaks. But, it wasn't just Ubisoft. Montreal had a long history of visual simulation with Soft Image and Discrete and several other companies that innovated, really pioneered, 3D content creation.

Not game specific, because it was before that. There was creativity in the arts with Cirque Du Soleil, science and engineering stuff with CAE, the whole aerospace industry there. There are four major universities there, computer science students, fine art - all the talent base you need. All that stuff is there. Using the eco-system metaphor, it's fertile ground for this stuff to happen.

There were several game companies there already, obviously not on the scale of Ubisoft, then they did the Ubisoft deal and the boulder started to roll, but even in that sense there's still a lot of other stuff going on in terms of funding training and government dollars going into academic research on game related topics. Industry bodies working together to do trade missions. There's all these things going on - tax incentives are just one of them.