Game over for gamers? UK studios count Brexit costs

Kilian FICHOU -

Could it possibly be game over for the bright minds behind “Grand Theft Auto” and other global gaming hits? UK developers have been quietly churning out video games like the urban crime smash series for decades to great critical acclaim — and commercial gain.
Britons created the “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” sensation and are rolling out ever-more ambitious projects that can be zapped to phones around the world on next-generation 5G networks.
But veterans such as Nick Button-Brown fear that Britain’s planned March 29 split from the European Union could shatter an industry that attracts world talent and pushes technological boundaries. “The gaming industry is very vulnerable to Brexit,” Button-Brown said in the computer screen-filled office of a London startup called Payload Studios.
Brexit could see Britain pull up its drawbridges: European workers will not find it as easy to move to come here and data adequacy rules that unite the remaining 27 bloc members in a single market may no longer apply.
Little can be more disruptive to a business built on the free flow of information and ideas. “I could hire the best people from across the EU and I could bring them over to work with my teams,” Button-Brown said. “I can’t do that anymore.”
Gaming is a £3 billion ($3.9 billion) industry that employs 20,000 people across the UK. Data from 2017 show EU nationals accounting for 34 per cent of that workforce. Around 1,350 of the 2,261 British gaming companies have at least one foreign employee.
Vincent Scheurer is particularly worried because he runs a small firm that relies on a tight-knit team of just 26. Larger companies can absorb the cost — estimated at $10,000 or more — of visas and the moving expenses of top-tier workers hired from outside the EU.
Smaller ones such as Scheurer’s rely heavily on EU talent because of the bloc’s freedom of movement rules.
Few markets are as competitive as gaming and the industry’s employees are overwhelming young and mobile.
Their abilities to code and know what teens want to play on their couches in India or Iran make them hot commodities as far afield as Silicon Valley and the IT hubs of Berlin.
Scheurer says the possibility of the pool of labour he can choose from shrinking overnight an “existential risk”.
Creative Assembly studio director Tim Heaton agrees. — AFP