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The UK’s game industry workforce has been brought to a standstill with employment rates set to shrink, according to a new report from NESTA.
NESTA – the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts – has surveyed numerous high-profile executives from within the UK games sector.
Feedback from the study shows that 84 per cent of its respondents enjoyed staff expansion of some kind over the past two years.
However, the report states that future prospects are “modest in the absence of a tax credit”, with 76 per cent of respondents saying they foresee little or no growth in their own companies.
The widespread survey received responses from people working for the likes of Activision, Microsoft, Bethesda, Eidos, Sony Computer Entertainment, Ubisoft, Realtime Worlds, Bizarre Creations, Codemasters, THQ, Frontier, Rebellion and Sports Interactive.
“Since the companies in our sample are generally outpacing the rest of the UK video games sector,” said NESTA, “these results would support the idea that, over the next 2 years, we will witness a decline in the numbers employed by the UK video games sector.”
NESTA added that “many UK studios have cut their staff, or gone out of business altogether”, in the last two years.
