Take-Two gets massive subsidies to make "british games". Namely the "british cultural game" Grand Theft Auto. How!? Yes, how is GTA a british game? Well you see Take-Two bought Rockstar, which itself was a formerly a fully UK owned company.
Now Take-Two has turned around and is buying out one of the UK's few remaining publishers. No doubt the UK will now pay Take-Two yet more generous subsidies to keep Codemasters running.
The UK government is literally taxing domestic industries to subsidize an over seas corporation to further buy out UK industry. This is not a cohesive plan. The last thing the UK needs is to hollow out yet more industry.
Sorry, none of what you wrote make any sense to me. Which company is being subsidised here?
Rockstar was from UK? I thought the first GTA was developed by Rockstar Canada? And its former self BMG Interactive Entertainment was part of the German arm of Bertelsmann AG.
I dont see how UK Government and public money has anything to do with all this, care to explain in more details?
I wouldn’t be so salty. Codemasters has devolved into pumping out racing games, which any big company with funding could do at this point. Gone are the days of the innovative Operation: Flashpoint games. Better to sell the studio before it buckles and give another British studio a shot.
While I'm sure this makes business sense, I wish this didn't happen as often when it comes to game software companies.
I've looked into ownership of old game IP's, for either remake/running on modern systems to asking if they'll make them legally freeware, and finding who owns an old IP after years of buyouts, mergers, selloffs, bankruptcies, etc is difficult if not impossible in some cases.
I remember having so much fun playing micromachines with, was it 8 people?, back in the day on the playstation one. We had an L-shaped extension, and we had to share a controller, using just left, right and brake. It was mayhem, and I think the reason I still have my google maps navigation with north always up!
Also, I happen to live in Birmingham and commute to Coventry. In the Birmingham museum and art gallery I was surprised to find an Amiga 500 used by the LSD demoscene group on display.
I would love to have an online upgraded version of micromachines today, but it would be so infested with micro transactions and loot boxes that I will probably lost interest.
Dizzy was one of my first favourites. "Immersive" would probably be an apt word for it. Amazing how much gameplay they could squeeze into available memory back then.
Think I played the first one on an Amstrad with the ol' green screen. They made a lot of decent games.
The thing I find most depressing is that it seems to me games are getting blander and blander as the size of the corporations that create them grows. Code masters games always had a sort of flavour of their own. It's happened to other british development shops like psygnosis (created wipeout, a game with a lot of personality ). Sony bought them and eventually closed them.
Well, for me Codemasters flavour is their way of fighting piracy by releasing extremely buggy games (which get pirated) and then releasing a good, playable version between one and six months later.
Also, very arcade racing games trying to pass as simulations.
As a car sim enthusiast I really hope their new owner realizes the mistake they made by making project cars 3 a clone of their other arcade racing games.
Totally off topic, but is there a thing about game studios and being in the middle of nowhere?
According to Wikipedia, Codemasters HQ is in Southam, which is a tiny town halfway attractive UK hotspots like Birmingham and Milton Keynes [0].
Similarly, Epic is in Cary, NC, a suburb of Raleigh. A bit less "middle of nowhere" than Southam maybe, but still, not particularly San Francisco or London either. What's up with that? Have game studios simply been remote longer? Or do gamedevs actually relocate en-masse to places like Southam and Cary for their jobs? How does this work? What's the employer pitch? "Sure, there's like one bar and half a supermarket, but you'll get to work on cool race games!"? (I'm not being dismissive, I'm genuinely curious if this is "a thing" and if so, how this works)
I worked for Codemasters in the late 90s when I was 18-19. I was trying to get out of menial work while teaching myself to code, and got a temp job as a games tester. I was "commuting" from one Warwickshire village to Southam, about 20-25 miles away.
To get to work I had to get a lift to a bus stop 4 miles away, where I'd catch a coach at about 7am that went cross country to Bristol. It would drop me off in Southam, then I'd walk for about half an hour to get to the Codemasters offices which were in remote converted farm buildings outside town.
On my first day I met a guy in Southam who said he worked there so I followed him. We had gone through several muddy fields before I saw that he was wearing wellington boots for the journey. I got to work covered in mud! Luckily nobody seemed to care or notice.
To get home, I'd get a ride back into Southam from a colleague, and wait in a pub for a couple of hours before catching the same coach I came in on. At that point I'd be in another town four miles from home. Then I'd go to a pub where my friends hung out and get a ride back with them. I'd get home about midnight.
I worked out I was losing money by working there, but I was desperate to get into the games industry and out of working class menial labour, so I carried on until my temp contract ran out. If I was more savvy I would have been able to finagle myself a permanent position, but honestly I was a pretty depressed, naïve kid at the time, and didn't really know what I was doing career wise.
Later I had a week long interview at another studio, Attention To Detail (who made Rollcage for the PS1) who were similarly remote. The other big game developer in the region was Blitz Games which was at least in Leamington Spa. I only had to get 2 buses to get to my interview there.
There's a lot of reasoning here, and some of it makes sense. But a lot of the time it's just where the founders are from. In the 80s when the home-computer revolution was kicking off, a lot of the kids/young adults that got good at making games and made a fortune off the nascent industry then went off to set up development studios. They were often from the shires, because it was a wealthy/middle-class pursuit, or was at least easier to get going when the family support machine was backing you.
The low pay thing I think is a misnomer, I worked in games from 1995-2005, and although yeah the pay wasn't great compared to other industries, it wasn't bad, and I worked full-time for three different London based studios and contracted for another two. It was certainly enough to live in London (at least then before the property market went crazy)
According to Google maps, Southam is about 25 minutes drive to Coventry or 15 minutes to Leamington Spa. It's not in the "middle of nowhere" in any important sense.
And Leamington is quite attractive - not a bad place to live. Coventry is probably ok too. Personally I would much rather be in a town like Leamington Spa than Birmingham or Milton Keynes. In general, small and medium size towns in the UK are far nicer than the big cities.
I'm mostly guessing here, but I'd say it's because a lot of these companies were probably founded by a couple of mates back in the 8/16-bit Acorn/Commodore/Atari era and just stayed where they were.
Gaming companies generally have a surplus of potential employees. These employees will do a lot to work in the gaming industry (see crunch time, lower pay, etc, etc.). So employees will move to where the companies are.
If you look at older companies they're often headquartered in second or third tier areas. Not middle of nowhere but also not the hip city. Seattle wasn't a hot place when Microsoft started there. South Bay (Google, Yahoo, etc, etc.) is pretty desolate compared to San Francisco and an 45 minute drive away. However commercial rent is cheaper and there's room to expand over time.
It's only companies that don't have good ways of pulling in employees that tend to locate in the hip areas as they need every advantage they can get.
edit: Also if your employees are older and with kids then they value more than living in the "hip" places. They want a nice calm suburban location with good schools.
It's certainly been a pattern for a while. Rare (obviously long since part of MGS) were/are based near Twycross, and Sierra Online were based in MFN long before it was cool.
Many years ago I once had to visit Rare for work and was surprised by the security. I wonder if part of it is that they aren't going to be visited by a constant stream of fans if they're harder to reach/find. From outside the gates it was totally un-obvious that it was the HQ of one of the most influential game dev studios of the 80s and 90s.
That being said, plenty of companies are still based in reasonably sized towns: Jagex and Frontier are both in a science park on the edge of Cambridge, EA in Guildford certainly used to be and maybe still are in an otherwise normal business park.
I remember years ago being approached about a job for a company in Exeter, a town stuck out on the western tip of England, with no possibility of remote. The job required very specific tech skills. When I told the recruiter I had no intention of moving to Exeter, he said glumly "that's what everyone says, but the client is dead set against remote". Nothing against Exeter, I've heard it's a nice place to visit, but I kind of wondered what galaxy-brain thinking was going on there.
Small hotspots appear where people leave companies, start their own and don't want to move.
Guildford is such a place for games in the UK. Yes, it's not too far from London but it's also fairly suburban. That sprung from Bullfrog/Lionhead, I guess. Hello Games, Criterion and Media Molecule are all based there.
The most famous example is the Seattle/Redmond area, where that hotspot sprung from Microsoft.
Game studios provide shitty salaries while at the same time having a dearth of talent available (because, game dev, dude...). By having offices in low cost of living places, they can maintain this equilibrium without raising wages.
An excolleague of mine worked for codemasters in the mid 90s, apparently codemasters was originally started by two brothers in a barn near their house. As the company took off they expanded and build upon the barn, ultimately absorbing it into the building it became. It was explained to me that you could still see support structures from the original barn with the office building itself.
So in this case it seems like a literal physical expansion of the classic garage coder idea.
In the UK, curiously, the seaside / holiday town of Bournemouth has become somewhat of a hotspot for the CGI industry, with the local university hosting the National Centre for Computer Animation.
The Raleigh/Durham area is very car-centric, and Epic is right next to the interstate highway. It's intended that you'll arrive by car, probably via the highway -- which is relatively easy whether you live in Cary, in downtown Raleigh, or somewhere else.
In my twenties, I remember attending a swing dance workshop in Durham. It was very well attended; the instructors had recently moved from San Francisco and had been pioneers in the swing dance community there.
At the time I didn't understand how one could be riding high in San Francisco and want to leave. But people who relocate to Raleigh/Durham often say that they move for the nice weather, for the low cost of living, for the fact that it offers a lot of culture while being fairly laid back.
Biased as I went there, but that's very close to the University of Warwick. I studied Maths, and then went into Software Engineering in London, but a lot of the CS grads went into local game studios like Codemasters.
"Coventry & Warwickshire has a globally significant gaming cluster which is one of the largest in the UK. The ‘Silicon Spa’ cluster employs over 2000 highly skilled people, equating to over 10% of the UK total in games development."
[+] [-] Danieru|5 years ago|reply
Take-Two gets massive subsidies to make "british games". Namely the "british cultural game" Grand Theft Auto. How!? Yes, how is GTA a british game? Well you see Take-Two bought Rockstar, which itself was a formerly a fully UK owned company.
Now Take-Two has turned around and is buying out one of the UK's few remaining publishers. No doubt the UK will now pay Take-Two yet more generous subsidies to keep Codemasters running.
The UK government is literally taxing domestic industries to subsidize an over seas corporation to further buy out UK industry. This is not a cohesive plan. The last thing the UK needs is to hollow out yet more industry.
[+] [-] ksec|5 years ago|reply
Rockstar was from UK? I thought the first GTA was developed by Rockstar Canada? And its former self BMG Interactive Entertainment was part of the German arm of Bertelsmann AG.
I dont see how UK Government and public money has anything to do with all this, care to explain in more details?
[+] [-] toyg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimbob45|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mysterydip|5 years ago|reply
I've looked into ownership of old game IP's, for either remake/running on modern systems to asking if they'll make them legally freeware, and finding who owns an old IP after years of buyouts, mergers, selloffs, bankruptcies, etc is difficult if not impossible in some cases.
[+] [-] disgruntledphd2|5 years ago|reply
To be fair to them, this is the company that re-released remastered X-Com games, along with the Mafia games.
I wouldn't expect to see Dizzy happen again, but you never know...
[+] [-] dm319|5 years ago|reply
Also, I happen to live in Birmingham and commute to Coventry. In the Birmingham museum and art gallery I was surprised to find an Amiga 500 used by the LSD demoscene group on display.
[+] [-] felipelemos|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ricardo81|5 years ago|reply
Think I played the first one on an Amstrad with the ol' green screen. They made a lot of decent games.
[+] [-] GhostVII|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bennysonething|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shorel|5 years ago|reply
Also, very arcade racing games trying to pass as simulations.
[+] [-] mellosouls|5 years ago|reply
https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/codemasters/zkdfnrd
[+] [-] cheschire|5 years ago|reply
Can someone with more business sense explain why the timing of this worked out this way?
[+] [-] gbin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madballster|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skrebbel|5 years ago|reply
According to Wikipedia, Codemasters HQ is in Southam, which is a tiny town halfway attractive UK hotspots like Birmingham and Milton Keynes [0].
Similarly, Epic is in Cary, NC, a suburb of Raleigh. A bit less "middle of nowhere" than Southam maybe, but still, not particularly San Francisco or London either. What's up with that? Have game studios simply been remote longer? Or do gamedevs actually relocate en-masse to places like Southam and Cary for their jobs? How does this work? What's the employer pitch? "Sure, there's like one bar and half a supermarket, but you'll get to work on cool race games!"? (I'm not being dismissive, I'm genuinely curious if this is "a thing" and if so, how this works)
[0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Southam,+UK/@52.2523264,-2...
[+] [-] richardjdare|5 years ago|reply
To get to work I had to get a lift to a bus stop 4 miles away, where I'd catch a coach at about 7am that went cross country to Bristol. It would drop me off in Southam, then I'd walk for about half an hour to get to the Codemasters offices which were in remote converted farm buildings outside town.
On my first day I met a guy in Southam who said he worked there so I followed him. We had gone through several muddy fields before I saw that he was wearing wellington boots for the journey. I got to work covered in mud! Luckily nobody seemed to care or notice.
To get home, I'd get a ride back into Southam from a colleague, and wait in a pub for a couple of hours before catching the same coach I came in on. At that point I'd be in another town four miles from home. Then I'd go to a pub where my friends hung out and get a ride back with them. I'd get home about midnight.
I worked out I was losing money by working there, but I was desperate to get into the games industry and out of working class menial labour, so I carried on until my temp contract ran out. If I was more savvy I would have been able to finagle myself a permanent position, but honestly I was a pretty depressed, naïve kid at the time, and didn't really know what I was doing career wise.
Later I had a week long interview at another studio, Attention To Detail (who made Rollcage for the PS1) who were similarly remote. The other big game developer in the region was Blitz Games which was at least in Leamington Spa. I only had to get 2 buses to get to my interview there.
[+] [-] louthy|5 years ago|reply
The low pay thing I think is a misnomer, I worked in games from 1995-2005, and although yeah the pay wasn't great compared to other industries, it wasn't bad, and I worked full-time for three different London based studios and contracted for another two. It was certainly enough to live in London (at least then before the property market went crazy)
[+] [-] jpab|5 years ago|reply
And Leamington is quite attractive - not a bad place to live. Coventry is probably ok too. Personally I would much rather be in a town like Leamington Spa than Birmingham or Milton Keynes. In general, small and medium size towns in the UK are far nicer than the big cities.
[+] [-] EspadaV9|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcinzm|5 years ago|reply
If you look at older companies they're often headquartered in second or third tier areas. Not middle of nowhere but also not the hip city. Seattle wasn't a hot place when Microsoft started there. South Bay (Google, Yahoo, etc, etc.) is pretty desolate compared to San Francisco and an 45 minute drive away. However commercial rent is cheaper and there's room to expand over time.
It's only companies that don't have good ways of pulling in employees that tend to locate in the hip areas as they need every advantage they can get.
edit: Also if your employees are older and with kids then they value more than living in the "hip" places. They want a nice calm suburban location with good schools.
[+] [-] bartread|5 years ago|reply
Many years ago I once had to visit Rare for work and was surprised by the security. I wonder if part of it is that they aren't going to be visited by a constant stream of fans if they're harder to reach/find. From outside the gates it was totally un-obvious that it was the HQ of one of the most influential game dev studios of the 80s and 90s.
That being said, plenty of companies are still based in reasonably sized towns: Jagex and Frontier are both in a science park on the edge of Cambridge, EA in Guildford certainly used to be and maybe still are in an otherwise normal business park.
[+] [-] danjac|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajb257|5 years ago|reply
Guildford is such a place for games in the UK. Yes, it's not too far from London but it's also fairly suburban. That sprung from Bullfrog/Lionhead, I guess. Hello Games, Criterion and Media Molecule are all based there.
The most famous example is the Seattle/Redmond area, where that hotspot sprung from Microsoft.
[+] [-] smabie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkachowski|5 years ago|reply
So in this case it seems like a literal physical expansion of the classic garage coder idea.
[+] [-] kawsper|5 years ago|reply
Nottingham is home of Dambuster Studios (former Free Radical Design Ltd. (later Crytek UK Limited)).
Runescape was also operated from the house of the founders parents in Nottingham before they got their offices, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/dec/11/games.onl...
[+] [-] KineticLensman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] impendia|5 years ago|reply
The Raleigh/Durham area is very car-centric, and Epic is right next to the interstate highway. It's intended that you'll arrive by car, probably via the highway -- which is relatively easy whether you live in Cary, in downtown Raleigh, or somewhere else.
In my twenties, I remember attending a swing dance workshop in Durham. It was very well attended; the instructors had recently moved from San Francisco and had been pioneers in the swing dance community there.
At the time I didn't understand how one could be riding high in San Francisco and want to leave. But people who relocate to Raleigh/Durham often say that they move for the nice weather, for the low cost of living, for the fact that it offers a lot of culture while being fairly laid back.
[+] [-] soylentgraham|5 years ago|reply
Only in the last... 8? Years (aside from Sony) we've seen big places in london, due to massive mobile profits.
Not sure even manchester has gotten many big places since psygnosis.
[+] [-] alexchamberlain|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nemrod67|5 years ago|reply
Source: worked in Paris for a medium Game Studio on a small wage before calling it quits
[+] [-] butler14|5 years ago|reply
http://backspaceuk.com/siliconspa/home-2.html
[+] [-] djhworld|5 years ago|reply
Also I'd imagine game dev is quite insular, it's not B2B other than dealing with publishers, so no need to be in close proximity to any "tech hub"
The value proposition for employees is an interesting one, I guess the allure of working in games is enough
[+] [-] bottled_poe|5 years ago|reply