As the UK government gets closer to General Elections, game industry group TIGA said it would continue to fight for tax relief for videogame developers up to and after such elections take place.
TIGA’s reaffirmation came in response to a comment from MP Stephen Timms that, “We [the Government] will continue to look at the industry's case for a change to tax treatment.”
Citing M2 Research, TIGA claims that the game industry lost 11,488 jobs globally between late 2008 and 2009. Of these figures, 71.0 percent of the losses were in the U.S., while European losses were 13.0 percent of the total. However, 81.0 percent of the Europe-based jobs lost were in the UK. TIGA compares this to Canada’s 2.0 percent contribution to global game job losses, noting that a videogame-friendly tax environment “undoubtedly helped the Canadian games industry to weather last year’s economic storm.”
TIGA CEO Richard Wilson added:
The forthcoming General Election will give TIGA a great opportunity to raise the industry’s profile amongst parliamentary candidates of all major political parties. Results are achieved by perseverance. TIGA will therefore continue to fly the flag of our creative, innovative and successful industry amongst policy makers in order to achieve measures that make a tangible difference to our sector.
