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COMMENT: Speaking up for the industry

Michael French
Editor, Develop magazine
May 30, 2008

This weekend I did something I’m not proud of. I bought the Mail on Sunday.

This momentary lapse of judgement, however, was worth it – if only to proudly read in the paper about the Games Up campaign which, as you'll have read in the story on the right (and via Develop’s email newsflashes earlier this week), has seen 15 games studios and the industry’s two trade associations come together on key issues facing the sector.

How good it is to see the industry unite on these matters – namely costs, the tax environment, and education – and stump up the cash to fund active lobbying to raise awareness about them.

Games Up puts forward its case by speaking to the wrinklies in Middle England and Parliament who still don’t understand video games.

That’s why the campaign focuses almost exclusively on the mainstream media initially, and stretches to a national campaign next month followed by lobbying constituency MPs and Parliamentary events.

Key targets will be attitudes like those held by the likes of Sir Digby-Jones who practically insulted a gathering of senior games industry senior execs at a private London Games Festival meeting just six months ago by saying he “didn't realise games were a serious industry”.

After these comments, and the Byron Review, the campaign sends a clear message to legislators: If the Government wants to lecture games firms over issues on the responsibility of content, it should expect them to fight back on key industrial issues that actually matter – all the things which allow for the various types of games the Byron Review praised and judged to be made in the first place.

Of course, that the campaign has made more noise via reports in the Mail and Financial Times in just a few days than anything done by the trade associations’ media relations activities might ruffle some feathers. But these quibbles are exactly what the united effort is seeking to avoid.

And no, the timing might not be perfect – Brown's cabinet has some slightly bigger, well-publicised issues to frown about – but Games Up has already got people talking about the issues which face the games industry.

Here’s hoping it changes the agenda for the better in the coming months so that when the Cabinet thinks ‘video games’ they don’t think ‘knife crime’, and instead think about the 10,000 creative people who have helped make the UK games industry the success story it is today.

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