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UK Codemasters Sold to Take-Two Games
- Danieru 6y agoThis is not fair to the British people. 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 6y agoSorry, 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?
- Danieru 6y agoHmm, judging from the downvotes it appears my comment relied on some sort of industry knowledge people don't know about perhaps? Rockstar is the studio formerly known as DMA Designs. DMA Designs is/was a british studio. DMA later changed their name to Rockstar. At one point yes, a subsidiary of Rockstar created GTA. Rockstar was later purchased by Take-Two. This was during the era publishers often strong armed their developers into acquisitions so no doubt there was some bullying involved. Take-Two receives a large portion of the major UK games development subsidy pot[1]. Take-Two has now, as per this article, buying yet another UK devloper/publisher. The UK games industry is getting hollowed out. All while the UK public is subsidizing the very companies performing the surgery. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/oct/02/revealed-global-video-games-giants-avoiding-millions-in-uk-tax-sony-sega https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/oct/02/revealed-globa...
- robk 6y agoWhere are the subsidies coming from though? I'm not aware of any gaming subsidy from hmrc
- Danieru 6y agoStraight from the tax department: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claiming-video-games-tax-relief-for-corporation-tax https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claiming-video-games-tax-relief-... Notice how the site claims cultural "British-ness" to be a requirement. Yet in reality GTA V passed this apparently low barrier. More likely the British-ness requirement is nothing more than a fig-leaf to appease the European Commission.
- jl6 6y agoFor what it’s worth, I do recognise a lot of the dark/surrealist humour in GTA as British, even though it is delivered through the medium of Americana.
- ajsnigrutin 6y agoGTA 6 - Britain, cast of players from Snatch (movie), and one star cops being unarmed, would be a fun game tho.
- nvrspyx 6y agoI'd love for GTA to go back to London (i.e. expansion packs for the first GTA). I'm ready to explore somewhere other than Liberty City, Vice City, or San Andreas, especially since the last one excluded a lot of areas from the original San Andreas.
- bserge 6y agoThe newest Watch Dogs is set in London, I believe. I've only watched the trailer, though.
- Philip-J-Fry 6y agoThe first GTA was made by DMA Design, who are now Rockstar North. That's why you're confused. According to Google Rockstar Canada made Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 and Grand Theft Auto: London 1961 which are expansions. Rockstar North are the main developer of the mainline GTA games, and they get subsidised because of that, because it's made in Britain and is recognised as "culturally British". Which, it sort of is, everyone knows GTA is made in Scotland.
- pqb 6y agoGTA even had a few minutes coverage on the BBC TV in 1996 [0] (mirror on the YouTube: [1]). Reporter visits the DMA studio and discusses with game developers. [0]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7372117.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7372117.stm [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Abz1xWpb3FU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Abz1xWpb3FU
- toyg 6y agoBlame the game, not the player. TakeTwo is not responsible for a bad UK policy - the UK government is.
- jimbob45 6y agoI 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.
- Danieru 6y agoYes but atleast that racing game factory paid taxes. Now Take Two will do has they have done with Rockstar and ship all profits overseas while claiming tax refunds using the credits. Code masters as thanks for being diligent tax payers has now been bought out by the very entity abusing the UK tax code. You can easily see how such a bad actor could pay more!
- skrebbel 6y agoTotally 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) [0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Southam,+UK/@52.2523264,-2.5115484,8z https://www.google.com/maps/place/Southam,+UK/@52.2523264,-2...
- marcinzm 6y agoGaming 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.
- KineticLensman 6y agoIn 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.
- bengale 6y agoBournemouth has been trying to make silicon beach a thing for a while now. There is a reasonable amount of tech going on here tbh.
- ricardo81 6y agoDizzy 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.
- dm319 6y agoI 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.
- felipelemos 6y agoI 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.
- baq 6y agoThere are a couple spiritual successors, I’ve recently had some fun with Toybox Turbos.
- tomxor 6y agoOh that would be cool! It could stay exactly the same as the original, but larger maps and some nice netcode. Someone did the same with webliero, it's an incredibly honest reproduction of the classic dos game, except with excellent multiplayer support that has given it new life.
- mysterydip 6y agoWhile 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.
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoI'm confused. All of Codemaster's IP will belong to Take 2 (well, 2k actually) after this move. 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...
- stevekemp 6y agoThere were a couple of "recent" Dizzy releases, in 2015 & 2016, as noted on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Twins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Twins But yeah I have a lot of good memories of the Dizzy series, on the ZX Spectrum, along with their other cheap & cheerful releases.
- mysterydip 6y agoI was speaking more in general terms than this specific instance. Take for example Broderbund: - purchased by the learning company, which got bought by softkey - combined company was sold to mattel - mattel interactive was sold to gores technology group - gores sold some to ubisoft and some to riverdeep - products were published by encore under license from riverdeep - riverdeep merged with houghton mifflin and later acquired harcourt to become houghton mifflin harcourt - hmh went through two rounds of restructuring and a recapitalization - encore went through some buying/selling/bankruptcy themselves Who owns the IP? Did it survive all the way to hmh and stay through the restructurings? I've looked up some bankruptcy records for other smaller software companies, and they've had hundreds of debtors, some of which themselves have since went bankrupt.
- cheschire 6y agoThere's clearly a connection between the release of Dirt 5 and this announcement, but for the life of me I cannot figure out what that is. Can someone with more business sense explain why the timing of this worked out this way?
- madballster 6y agoAnyone remember BMX Simulator. I think that was my first game on my C64.
- GhostVII 6y agoThat's too bad, the Dirt series is my favourite, especially the more sim-style games like Dirt Rally
- gbin 6y agoAs 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.
- bennysonething 6y agoThe 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.
- Shorel 6y agoWell, 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.
- mellosouls 6y agoLinked in the article, worth checking out, a short feature from the 80s on the nascent business: https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/codemasters/zkdfnrd https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/codemasters/zkdfnrd