A blockbuster launch may bring an extra life to British games makers
The game, which was made in Edinburgh on a reported budget of £170m ($270m), is a triumph for the British video-game industry. The firm that makes GTA V, Rockstar North, is expected to take as much as £1 billion in revenues. Sadly, however, this success is nowadays rare. Beneath the hype Britain’s video-game industry is a shadow of what it once was. Days before GTA V’s release, one of the country’s oldest and largest studios, Blitz, announced it would close. Its boss, Philip Oliver, blamed fierce competition for contracts.
British weakness largely reflects the state of the industry globally. The two main consoles—the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3—are both reaching the end of their life cycles. Sales of games in Britain fell from £2 billion in 2010 to £1.6 billion last year (in both physical and electronic format), a decline that was mirrored worldwide. That partly explains why, according to data gathered by TIGA, an industry body, the number of creative staff employed by British studios has fallen from 9,900 in 2008 to 9,224 last year.
