As CEO of videogame trade association Tiga, Dr. Richard Wilson’s role is to promote the interests of the UK development community. Facing challenges such as a nationwide brain drain as experienced workers are lured overseas by the promise of more generous tax incentives, and a shortage of skilled graduates entering the market to replace them (a point EA's Matthew Jeffery spoke to us about last year) , he hasn’t been troubled for places to start work. We caught up with Wilson yesterday in the Palace of Westminster as he unveiled two new projects: the formation of an All-Party Parliamentary Group to raise awareness of the issues facing the games industry within Parliament, and Play Together, a joint initiative with NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts) to foster greater collaboration within the UK development community.

How did the all-party group come about, and what are its objectives?
Tiga's vision is to make the UK the best place in the world to do games business. To that extent we focus on three activities: political representation, maximising our media coverage, and developing services to benefit our members. One way to drive the agenda forward is by establishing an all-party group. There wasn't an all-party group on video games until Tiga instigated it. I approached Bill Olner, a Labour MP: he was supportive and recruited around 20 MPs from all the major political parties and peers [members of the House Of Lords]. The group's role is to look at issues that matter to the games industry, to develop policies that advance the industry's case, and provide a forum in Parliament to look at these issues. At the same time we've been campaigning vigorously to improve the tax environment in the UK and to try and improve skills and training within the videogames sector. You can't wait for government to take action all the time: you have got to keep on lobbying.

Why has it taken so long for such a group to be formed?
I think it's down to initiative and leadership. I wanted to launch an all-party group when I put in my application for this job, and luckily the people interviewing me thought it was a good idea.

Is it too little, too late? In the last few years, developers like Rare and Lionhead have been bought by Microsoft, and Eidos, the UK’s largest publisher, has been sold to Square-Enix.
You always wish you'd done things earlier, but I think there's everything to play for, because although things have changed within the games industry, nonetheless we still have enormous potential. As you know, partly thanks to GTA, we reclaimed our position as third largest country in the world in terms of videogame revenue. We're still the largest country for games development in Europe. By setting up a cross-Parliamentary group now, after having spent the last fifteen months campaigning very vigorously on the tax breaks issue means I think we've got a very good platform. In fact, if we'd tried to launch it last year without having campaigned so vigorously on those various issues, I think it would have been harder to get Parliamentary interest.

Is there any chance of bringing publishing back to the UK in a big way?
I think that it may come back in a different format. If we are successful in getting a more favourable tax environment, I think we would see more external investment and more publishers locating here. We can attract publishers back.

NESTA’s recent Raise the Game paper offered a bleak view of the UK industry, with talent increasingly lured abroad, and only eighteen percent of UK games development graduates ending up working in the industry. Is it fair to say you’ve got your work cut out for you?
I don't think one should interpret that report as being unremittingly bleak. One thing I find enormously encouraging is that Tiga's own research shows that in a typical UK game development studio just under 60 per cent of staff are qualified to degree level. In some studios it rises to about 80 per cent. Those people have degrees in computer science, maths, physics, art, animation. Our own research shows that the actual staff that we have working in games studios do have the skills we need. Game developers aren't saying to me that the staff they have are poor. But it's a question of making sure we get even better staff in the future, and increase the flow. And although there has been a criticism levelled at UK universities, I don't think we want to exaggerate the problem, because if we look at another measure of higher education performance like the Shanghai University League table of the best universities in the world, it's dominated by the USA, but the UK is in second position with four universities in the top thirty. And Tiga itself is taking measures to try and improve the situation: we have recently become an awarding body for the Train2Game distance learning courses, which I hope will be another way of addressing the skills need in the sector.

Yet a lot of developers have said they need to retrain most graduates before they can put them to work on projects, and only four out of over 80 degree courses have been accredited by Skillset as being fit for purpose. What’s the solution?
The government needs to invest more in higher education. Look at it from an international perspective: UK universities receive about one per cent of gross national product, USA universities about 2.9 per cent, Chinese about 1.3 per cent, so we want to benchmark ourselves against the best countries in the world in terms of expenditure. The second thing is that some specific courses have suffered from cutbacks, computer science in particular. The third thing that we need to do is make sure that Tiga and the games industry work more closely with universities and training providers to make sure that they understand precisely what games businesses need, so that staff can hit the ground running.

Britain’s lagging behind countries like France and Canada in terms of tax breaks, and the R&D tax credit system is apparently rather cumbersome. NESTA suggested creating a ‘prototype fund’ to alleviate the front-loaded costs of development. Is that something you’re in favour of?
There are a number of issues here. I think a prototype fund for games development would be excellent. The government introduced a strategic investment fund in the last budget amounting to £700 million. I would like to see some of that being used for a prototype fund: I don't think all the money has been assigned yet, so let's set it up.

With regards to tax credits for research and development, they are quite cumbersome. They were introduced quite early on in the present administration, and developers who have had access to them have found them to be useful, but I think that in the best circumstances they only amount to about a saving of five percent of the total cost of a videogame. I would like to see them more generous. Perhaps things such as rent and rates - things that are paid for by a game development studio - should be included as part of the tax break for R&D. Canada has very generous R&D tax credits on top of tax breaks for counter production, so let's make our tax credits for R&D generous too. And with regard to the tax break for games production, I think at the bare minimum we would like to have the French system adopted in the UK: in other words, there would be a twenty percent tax break for games production which could be used to offset corporation tax. We would have to go with the French system rather than the very generous Canadian system, because we have to get in through the European Commission.

Which the French did.
Yes. With typical Gallic flair.