Tax Breaks for UK Games Companies

From Pocket-Lint The chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, has offered tax breaks to video games developers in an attempt to encourage the burgeoning industry in Britain. Darling said that the “creative industries, including the video games industry, make a valuable economic and cultural contribution to the UK”, and added that a tax credit system … Continue reading “Tax Breaks for UK Games Companies”

From Pocket-Lint

The chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, has offered tax breaks to video games developers in an attempt to encourage the burgeoning industry in Britain.

Darling said that the “creative industries, including the video games industry, make a valuable economic and cultural contribution to the UK”, and added that a tax credit system will be on offer, similar to the one offered to the British film industry. It’ll make it cheaper to build games in Britain.

While the amount of tax break has not been made apparent, it should help spur some games development companies into forming in the province.

The question being – tax is a problem for companies making money. How is Northern Ireland placed to take advantage of this tax break?

[and as @jearle pointed out, he and I are both available to develop game ideas and settings. His website is http://nightfall.me and my games website is http://lategaming.com]

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0 thoughts on “Tax Breaks for UK Games Companies”

  1. Tax breaks have yet to be confirmed and subject to EU approval, and whilst welcome I don’t think its the saviour, especially for NI. Tax wasn’t an issue or i imagine an issue for many people starting up (maybe for investors, but none mentioned tax breaks in speaking with us).

    Quality of life in Canada and greater recognition/respect for games industry are huge incentives for developers compared to UK. The lack of expert skills and full-time developers in NI is still a major barrier.

    NI companies have access to grants which are more beneficial than tax breaks, especially when starting up. Tax breaks may encourage large UK companies but there’s a lot more to it than that. Events like Ingage are a good start but 2-3 successful full-time games companies is what NI really needs

  2. Absolutely, Liam. As I said, Tax is a problem for companies making money.

    The reason we have a favourable grant funding structure is because we have a serious market failure in private funding. The issue then is that you still need match funding to access this grant funding so in many cases, for the startups, it;s not enough.

    Without events like INGAGE (today at BMC), and the development of games companies locally, we’re never going to keep good games developers here anyway.

  3. Pingback: Northern Ireland Games Industry — /home/conor/ramblings

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