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The UK gaming industry is set to get tax breaks following on from the European Commission's approval today. However, the government will only support games with “cultural content” meaning that all UK based developers will have to go through a culture test in order to qualify.
The ruling will relieve 25 per cent of tax on up to 80 per cent of a game's production budget as long as it is spent in the UK. Each game under a company will be considered a separate entity, meaning that larger studios can immediately take advantage once a game goes in to development as long as it passes the culture test.
Not all details are confirmed yet but the culture test proposal suggests that evaluated titles will have to have a percentage of the game set in the UK or another European Economic Area, the amount of characters in the region will also be taken in to account and even how much of the game's dialogue is English. In short, the game must promote British culture in some way or another to apply.
Association for UK Interactive Entertainment CEO, Dr. Jo Twist, said: “This is a huge boost to the UK games and interactive entertainment sector and the start of a great new era of games production in the UK. We are delighted the European Commission recognised the clear market failure for the production of games with a British and European flavour, using UK-based creative and highly skilled talent.”
KitGuru Says: It's great that the UK gaming industry is finally getting some tax relief. However, the culture test seems quite restrictive on the game's content, although none of the details of it have been finalised yet.
Source: Game Informer
In lots of ways this is a good thing. The ‘culture test’, while invoking the typical acid-reflux reaction that any Tory-influenced buzz-term does, is actually not that bad and certainly not what it sounds. I was expecting that it would have to not include violence, drugs, etc, and have a certain proportion of the game soundtrack as Wagner and a certain proportion of the games dialogue as Shakespeare quotes…
As long as they can be flexible it shouldn’t be an issue: for instance, a science fiction like Mass Effect can’t really set games in the UK, but they can have London as a HQ of some sort (as they do in ME3), and they could have UK English rather than US English as the major spoken language. If they’re flexible enough to judge each game by its own potential then I don’t see it being a problem. It might even poke Ubi to finally do an Assassins Creed set in the Industrial Revolution too…