Thinking Global About Games Development

There is an interesting article about the thoughts of Jason Della Rocca, former IGDA head on tax breaks and global ambitions…

The tax-break issue… It’s not about the tax-breaks alone. When I talk about the industry I talk about an eco-system kind of metaphor. It’s very dynamic, it’s a complex system, there’s lots going on, it’s not clear that introducing a tax-break is going to be the thing that all of a sudden makes your ecosystem thrive. … In fact there are regions where there’s nothing – it’s a desert. So you say, we have this desert and we’d really like there to be a game industry there because we think it’s sexy and good jobs etc. So they look at Canada and say, well, they’re doing so well because they have these tax-breaks, let’s put a tax-break in our desert. … It’s a complex system, and it’s hard to predict what one change would have on that system, but it’s really not about tax breaks, it’s about so much other stuff.

There is that ‘e’ word again as in ‘eco-system’, as in ‘ecology’, as in Media Ecology… This I think is the key approach to any kind of technology development.