The ML Editor

Stiff international competition is threatening UK’s tenuous hold on the third place in the global video games production market. Representatives from reputed gaming companies like Eidos and Codemasters discussed measures to boost the growth of the industry at the recent eforum held in Whitehall, London

The Westminster eForum held recently witnessed Chris Deering from Codemasters, David Braben, the co-writer of the hugely popular game Elite, and Ian Livingstone from Eidos, gather to discuss immediate measures that the games industry would push the government to adopt in its pre-budget report.

Broadband has a very significant impact on the fortunes of the games industry in the UK, more so, because many of the popular and commercially successful games bank heavily on online features. Even the government’s 2Mb by 2012 broadband programme will not be able to match industry demand, says Keith Ramsdale, Electronic Arts’ Vice-president for Northern Europe. He stressed on the need for quicker broadband that would support game applications easily.

Many speakers at the eForum appealed for more sops for the game industry from the British government, especially as it contributed more to the economy of the UK than the film industry, which gets £100million annually in tax credits.

Britain is currently the third-largest maker of computer and video games in the world, but the sinking games industry has to be revived quickly before Canada and France overtake it as both the countries give attractive tax concessions to games developers.

For information on your ISP and corresponding broadband speed, try using the broadband test from Broadband Genie to get a snapshot of your current download and upload speeds, it also has an independent guide to the broadband packages suitable for gamers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 10:34 am and is filed under Buyers + Consumers, Free Games + More, Tech Specs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.