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Ed Balls is wrong to claim tax credits would have helped RealTime Worlds
GamesIndustry.biz is reporting on a speech by Ed Balls, the Labour leader candidate, linking the refusal of the coalition government to implement games tax credits with the demise of RealTime Worlds.
This is so wrong-headed I don’t know where to begin. My first (and pretty furious) response was on the GI.biz comments page:
And tax credits would have saved them.
No, no, no. Calls like this from ill-informed and opportunistic MPs only make me even more convinced that tax breaks exist to prop failing dinosaurs of games companies and have no place in Britain’s dynamic future as a games development powerhouse.
For anyone who wants to know about how I think, you should read:
- Are tax breaks dooming Canada to second-class status?
- Video game tax breaks: Short term gain for long term pain?
Tadhg Kelly of Simple Forms also offered his opinion:
I hope that the right lessons are learned from the RealTime Worlds failure, not the wrong ones.