Games development trade association Tiga hopes the newly arrived culture ministers, James Purnell and Margaret Hodge, in Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s cabinet maintain the support that previous culture ‘Czar’ Shaun Woodward (who has been shuffled off to the much less stressful Northern Ireland office) gave the UK’s games industry.

A recent report Woodward co-unveiled last month called for a games academy to help UK developers build a talent base. Woodward was keen to point out that, thanks to tax breaks and subsidy incentives in regions such as Canada, the UK industry is suffering a talent-drain.

Tiga CEO, Fred Hasson, (pictured) said: “[In Shaun Woodward] we had a Minister who took the time to listen to the industry and verify what we told him and recognise the importance of the industry. He understood that a successful industry is not only based on vat receipts from growing sales at retail, and that we need to focus on skills, talent and importantly that the sector should be supported, if it is to compete against subsidies in other territories”.

Hasson added, “We are pleased that new Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) Ministers James Purnell and Margaret Hodge have recently had Ministerial responsibilities for the ‘games’ sector, so that hopefully they will be able to pick up where Shaun Woodward left off but we need to keep the flow of evidence going to these new Ministers… We are currently working on finding solutions to delays in work permit delays for non EU nationals, and on uncertainties and underperformance of R&D Tax Credits regime, but we need all in the industry to keep us informed of what is going on out there. Information passed on is kept confidential.”

Quite why the CEO of one of the games industry’s major advocacy bodies decided to release a press statement in which the word ‘games’ was placed in quotation marks is beyond SPOnG.

In April this year we also reported on Eidos/SCi Entertainment chief executive, Jane Cavanagh’s demand for tax breaks for the GAMES industry. At that time figures were stating that “over the last six years the UK games industry has more than halved in size, dropping from 400 independent studios to 150”. This makes us a little concerned at Tiga’s praise for Woodward’s support of the local games-making community.