**UK video game businesses are to receive a £4 million funding boost from the Government to aid the industry’s growth.
The fund will aim to support small and start-up companies turn ideas into reality and will reinforce a growth business that has provided world global blockbusters like Tomb Raider, Little Big Planet, Runescape, Monument Valley and Batman: Arkham Knight.
Over the four years from 2015 to 2019, the Video Games Prototype Fund, which will be administered from offices in Dundee and London, will offer grants of up to £25,000 to support video games projects, as well as creating jobs, nurturing talent and furthering the growth of games clusters all around the UK.
The fund forms part of a package of measures the Government has introduced for the sector including the highly successful tax reliefs.
Features will include grants of up to £25,000 to help new and young games development businesses create working prototype games and up to £50,000 for a limited number of projects to take their ideas beyond the prototype phase
I believe Canada also has something similar to this - but from my limited understanding it’s only for large companies, that’s why certain larger AAA companies setup shop in Vancouver a while back. Tax breaks for the big men.
I also believe certain states have tax break opportunities for tech companies - which game development falls under, but similar to the Canadian advantage - its for companies not indies. Just from recollection I think Louisiana is one of them, setup after Katrina, and Georgia also has some tech tax breaks as well, or at least they used to.
You cannot blame Obama for this. An effort like that would need to start in Congress. The president of the USA can sign a bill into law, but cannot write the bill himself. If you really want to have a similar funding program here in the USA, contact your representative in Congress.
Poe’s law is an Internet adage which states that, without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, parodies of extreme views will, to some readers, be indistinguishable from sincere expressions of the parodied views.
US has plenty of funds at local, state, and school/university levels that fund such things that are ultimately funded by a US federal government deficit. Generally though you need to associated directly with one of the institutions that is doing the funding. I’ve seen some of the results of such funding in my state a couple of years back and no the games weren’t any better and often worse than a lot of what single individuals are doing in the forum’s WIP or Showcases on a shoestring budget.
Um, yeah. I have seen people laugh at all sorts of stuff, much of which was rude, obnoxious, racist, and insulting… having to do with our President. So I take it all very seriously, even with a few “ha’s”.
Not to say you meant it to be taken that way, but probably best not to go there.
The main problem in the legislative branch of our government is the lack of term limits combined with voters who always assume their own legislative representatives are not the problem. Everybody says “Congress sucks, but not my representative”. So we end up with nearly life time terms for a lot of senators. The responsibility for that problem is the voters. No matter how much we complain about Congress, we mostly vote the same people back.
Worse than that, some Americans don’t understand the branches of our own government. I have talked to people that did not know we had a legislative branch. I have met people that thought Congress was appointed by the president. I even know a few people that think the president sets the price of crude oil and gasoline. It is nearly impossible to have a conversation about issues when a lot of Americans don’t understand some of the basic concepts.
The problem is probably the same as we have here. People vote for the party without checking what extreme views their local rep has before voting them in. Once enough of the far left/right get in on a party ticket they pressure the whole party to start moving their way which opens up the middle ground like a big no mans land that no one risks crossing.
On topic, we had a similar fund here but the government cut it as a budget saving measure so they could continue to give big tax breaks to mining companies. The games that came out were apparently really critically good but not popular money earners. They funded games that were topical but wouldn’t have been funds any other way.
My congressman has been in congress so long I was a 15 year old busboy cleaning up his table after he finished on the 1st job I ever had that required government permission to work.
I’m much rather those congress folk, president, and judicial branches took a cue from the HSUS.org and start purging big agribusiness and the USDA of corrupt rules and corrupt workers.
As far as investing in gaming USA feds spent a lot more than the UK on gaming and a lot of other vaporware. You just need to be attending the right institute and have the right teacher at the right time to take advantage. So it’s a bit of luck and money too because elite and state unis get more opportunities for those funds and jobs. e.g. My 1st job out of college could have been for the feds working for the census bureau because my stats professor gave me a good recommendation and I didn’t do anything but interview for 5 minutes when they visited campus. That’s what you need. It’s not magic. Perl and a lot of other software was written by government employees babysitting a phone. You didn’t really think all that freeware was written in 4 - 6 hours every evening after folk got back home from their day jobs did you?
