Scottish Academic On Proposed Foreign Tax Breaks

19 Oct 2009 at 11:07:30 by

The story of proposed tax incentives for game developers in Ireland is one we've been following closely here at IncGamers.

We know the Irish government is contemplating offering Scottish developers tax holidays to bring them to Ireland, and we know that some studios find the potential offer attractive.

But what effect will this have on the industry and, in particular, graduates. The University of Abertay Dundee is a Scottish Centre for Excellence in Computer Games Education and has been providing graduates to the industry for many years. Professor Paul Harris, the creative director at the Institute of Arts, Media and Computer Games said there is an indirect threat to the thriving Scottish business.

"[W]e could lose companies to subsidised territories who are able to incentivise their attractiveness in establishing such inward investment, and secondly these companies can then offer attractive pay and lifestyle packages to talented individuals from our home clusters to join them, thus further enhancing their talent base and conversely eroding ours," he told IncGamers.

When asked what would happen to the student base if more and more developers decided to move out of Scotland, he said "integration within a thriving cluster would be affected" and that it would be "harder to retain them in our economy after graduation," having a knock on effect on the local economy, and the wider, national economy as a whole.

And the threat to Abertay? Well, according to Professor Harris, that is minimal as the university is well established and recognised for the calibre of graduate it produces. It is also a part of the Dare to be Digital initiative which is part of a wider, industry-accredited scheme that sees students learning key skills sets required for the industry with key players such as BBC, TRC-media, Microsoft, Sky, Realtime Worlds, Denki and 4J Studios.

So what's next? Well, Professor Harris suggests more money should be offered to developers in order to eliminate the threat of business loss to other territories by delivering "industrially-relevant provision[s], such as our own resource-intensive programmes at Abertay; combined with strategic, applied research interventions that would enable further innovation and opportunities for sectoral growth, thus appropriately funding industrially, economically and socially relevant projects such as the White Space research portfolio."

It seems now that all we're waiting for is the UK government to act before another, closer neighbour bags our talented workforce.

We'll have a statement from the Siôn Simon, minister for the creative industries, later on today.

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