Lack of information
Starting the new year afresh and reinvigorated, I am looking forward to 2015 and the changes it will bring. In an effort to get out from the hole I’ve made for myself to quietly work away on client work, I thought I’d shared below the response I just wrote up to the question: How the issues that hinder the growth of creative industries can be overcome, and how to capitalise on opportunities?
To me the biggest thing that the public sector could do to aid the creative industries, especially games, is to provide the broader view that we in the private sector are solely lacking. The dearth of information on what is actually happening in the games industry is shameful. Sharing of information will help us all to grow, to avoid making the same mistakes, to spot opportunities as they arise and not well after they’ve been exploited by others. But we can barely even claim to know how many studios and developers are in the industry, let alone the more useful information like what they are working on or in what areas they are seeing growth/recession. We have trade bodies who poll their own members, but that represents only a fraction of the industry currently working. It’s frankly embarrassing that so little resources are put into tracking what the games industry is doing, and it seems to me that the government itself would benefit from being able to point to the growth of the Scottish games industry. It’s a manageably small sector to collect information on, smaller than the UK, and I’d guess more interconnected as well.
We in the Scottish games industry want to be able to shout about our successes, but we can’t, because we don’t have the context to say how much better we are doing than last year. Individual successes are great, but they are fleeting, what matters is the overall trend in the industry. I feel that it’s a positive trend, but I have absolutely no data to back that up, and asking around, it seems that no-one else does either, not even the government bodies who are supposed to be there to support the industry. But how can we be supported if they don’t even know who we are and what we’re doing? Don’t we run the risk of allocating resources based on a woefully out of date picture of what is happening? What use is it to the industry if support is provided for console games that form a dwindling share of development; or for social games when our market has moved on to mobile platforms?
I think that the very first step that must be taken is to put resources in to dramatically improve the information we have on the games industry as it is now; and to commit to keeping that information current as quickly as the industry itself moves. Without that information to inform us, I feel that the answers to all of the other questions the committee are asking run the risk of being out of date and useless before any actual answers can be agreed upon. Armed with that information, the public sector can know who to engage with, and the private sector can know how their industry is changing and seek out new opportunities rather than be left behind.