After years of campaigning about it from the industry, the UK Government has finally announced tax breaks for the games industry. Congratulations to TIGA, ELSPA and all the developers that worked with them on making the case for them.
There are very few details as yet, but Develop have been carving a few out including that [...]

Parliament commissioned an educational game: MP For A Week. Nicholas Lovell Dan Griliopoulos reviews it on Games Brief.
It guises as educational, and to an extent is, but it also smacks heavily of PR, as Nicholas points out:
The win element also implies that bad MPs always in the long run are losers, which is not strictly [...]

Matt Jones from BERG has been nominating console games for the Designs of The Year Exhibition, and they keep getting rejected.
On one level, I can see why: shooters such as Left 4 Dead 2 and Bioshock and aren’t the kind of things that represent games particularly well to outsiders, even though they may be visually [...]

Richard Wilson speaking out on tax breaks and RDAs. On the one hand he’s right: It does create an incoherent and highly variable national picture, with everything from smoothly run games bodies like CodeWorks in the Northeast, to stagnant efforts at them or no such bodies in other regions. Richard’s words also plug smoothly into [...]

In 2005, the BBC did some research into who plays games in the UK, and the results were good for the time: even compensating for age groups not included in the research by assuming noone in those brackets plays, and excluding people who play some form of game less than once a week, 40% of [...]

Ed Vaizey calling for TIGA and ELSPA to merge and form a single trade association. I can see his point in terms of recognition and simplicity for policy makers, but can you imagine both working under one name and efficiently setting priorities?
While there’s a lot they have in common, there are still a great [...]

Less than a month ago since people were voicing doubts about games companies staying in Prince Edward Island. Now we see what’s quite possibly the beginning of a new round of funding and tax breaks, with Ontario announcing a new fund for technology companies in the province.
How long do you need to assist businesses for [...]

In an astounding piece of news, due to a loophole of China’s legal system, World of Warcraft just lost nearly half of its playerbase. The servers in China have been shut down for a month now, due to legal issues with former partner organisation The9. There’s no obvious end to the legal battle, and Chinese [...]

The Australian Government have decided that the citizens of the country are no more developed than children and don’t need large swathes of what will be a big part of culture in this century: games with adult content will be banned outright (via No Tall Poppies).
They have no 18+ rating in Australia, the sternest rating [...]

Industry chuntering on tax breaks is seeming slightly less idealistic this week, with the past few including a mention in the Digital Britain report. Late last week, minister for culture Sion Simon wrote to the heads of ELSPA and TIGA asking them to justify tax breaks for the industry, reports, er, the Mirror. You can [...]