Britain’s Game Development Industry Waning?
Recent reports show the games industry in Britain is being threatened. Britain used to be a leading game development country, but fell from third to fourth, behind Canada, in 2006. The BBC News website in the UK has one supposed cause, which is the Universities’ lack of effective video game development courses that are creating unprepared students. Other’s however have a different view on the matter.
BBC News reports that the campaign group, “Games Up?” says there are 81 video games degree courses and only 4 are accredited. David Braben, the chairman of Frontier Developments, and spokesman for “Games Up?” said “95% of video gaming degrees are simply not fit for purpose. Without some sort of common standard, like Skillset accreditation, these degrees are a waste of time for all concerned.”, reported BBC News. Recent trends show the students’ math and computer science skills declining.
However, one unnamed game developer has a different take on the situation in an interview with silicon.com. He felt that the recent generation of game developers are skipping important steps. Anyone over 28 had “taught themselves, they’ve been on courses that aren’t necessarily video game courses — they may be maths or engineering or more general purpose software engineering.” Furthermore, he said game developers used to have to learn all about the system, every aspect of hardware and software, and the current selection of graduates “don’t really understand all those basics; they don’t really know what’s going on under the hood… That’s where the real discrepancy comes.” Older British developers like the publisher Psygnosis (best known for Shadow of the Beast and Lemmings) or The Bitmap Brothers didn’t have game programming courses to take. They spent more time learning themselves on the systems of the day. They had machines like the Atari ST or Sinclair Spectrum to explore and play games on. Now, however, aspiring developers do not have many systems like that to play games on, they have consoles like the XBox 360 or Playstation 3 that don’t have any flexibility to explore and learn the extent of the system.
Both reasons seem plausible, and they don’t need to be taken separately. The lack of skills in new college students because of the “plug and play” console systems could be leading to the lower standard of game development student. Perhaps the universities could do more with these students, however, both issues need to be addressed, as just fixing one will not fix the entire problem.
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