Flanders and the games industry

Posted on by

I’m having a meeting this afternoon at the Flemish ministry of innovation where they’ll tell my colleague developers and me how they intend to support the local games industry.

The local games industry of course is almost non-existent over here as our socio-economic climate is extremely hostile to the kind of thing we do. High labour taxes, necessary to finance a defunct and inefficient social system, together with good supportive measures for stimulating the games industry in neighboring countries, have made this place probably the worst possible to run a game development studio from.

I once calculated that my average cost per employee is the same as that of a top AAA studio in the USA, except that over there access to investment cash is a lot easier. And don’t get me started on Canada!

I’m very curious to hear what they came up with. It’s a tradition here that the high costs are compensated through subsidies, which politically I disagree with, but economically find that I must use if I want to keep on making games and compete on the global market.

The best option for Larian really would be to move out of here, but local roots are important to us, so I really hope the package they’ll present makes economical sense. There’s so much talent here and it’s a shame to see it continuously leave the country.