Take-Two gets massive subsidies to make "british games". Namely the "british cultural game" Grand Theft Auto. How!? Yes, how is GTA a british game? Well you see Take-Two bought Rockstar, which itself was a formerly a fully UK owned company.
Now Take-Two has turned around and is buying out one of the UK's few remaining publishers. No doubt the UK will now pay Take-Two yet more generous subsidies to keep Codemasters running.
The UK government is literally taxing domestic industries to subsidize an over seas corporation to further buy out UK industry. This is not a cohesive plan. The last thing the UK needs is to hollow out yet more industry.
Sorry, none of what you wrote make any sense to me. Which company is being subsidised here?
Rockstar was from UK? I thought the first GTA was developed by Rockstar Canada? And its former self BMG Interactive Entertainment was part of the German arm of Bertelsmann AG.
I dont see how UK Government and public money has anything to do with all this, care to explain in more details?
Hmm, judging from the downvotes it appears my comment relied on some sort of industry knowledge people don't know about perhaps?
Rockstar is the studio formerly known as DMA Designs. DMA Designs is/was a british studio. DMA later changed their name to Rockstar. At one point yes, a subsidiary of Rockstar created GTA.
Rockstar was later purchased by Take-Two. This was during the era publishers often strong armed their developers into acquisitions so no doubt there was some bullying involved. Take-Two receives a large portion of the major UK games development subsidy pot[1].
Take-Two has now, as per this article, buying yet another UK devloper/publisher. The UK games industry is getting hollowed out. All while the UK public is subsidizing the very companies performing the surgery.
I'd love for GTA to go back to London (i.e. expansion packs for the first GTA). I'm ready to explore somewhere other than Liberty City, Vice City, or San Andreas, especially since the last one excluded a lot of areas from the original San Andreas.
Yes, it is! And they've done a superb job in my opinion. Very strange seeing your city in a video game - wish there were more London, or European city, based open world games.
For what it’s worth, I do recognise a lot of the dark/surrealist humour in GTA as British, even though it is delivered through the medium of Americana.
The first GTA was made by DMA Design, who are now Rockstar North. That's why you're confused. According to Google Rockstar Canada made Grand Theft Auto: London 1969 and Grand Theft Auto: London 1961 which are expansions.
Rockstar North are the main developer of the mainline GTA games, and they get subsidised because of that, because it's made in Britain and is recognised as "culturally British". Which, it sort of is, everyone knows GTA is made in Scotland.
GTA even had a few minutes coverage on the BBC TV in 1996 [0] (mirror on the YouTube: [1]). Reporter visits the DMA studio and discusses with game developers.
I wouldn’t be so salty. Codemasters has devolved into pumping out racing games, which any big company with funding could do at this point. Gone are the days of the innovative Operation: Flashpoint games. Better to sell the studio before it buckles and give another British studio a shot.
Yes but atleast that racing game factory paid taxes. Now Take Two will do has they have done with Rockstar and ship all profits overseas while claiming tax refunds using the credits.
Code masters as thanks for being diligent tax payers has now been bought out by the very entity abusing the UK tax code. You can easily see how such a bad actor could pay more!
While I'm sure this makes business sense, I wish this didn't happen as often when it comes to game software companies.
I've looked into ownership of old game IP's, for either remake/running on modern systems to asking if they'll make them legally freeware, and finding who owns an old IP after years of buyouts, mergers, selloffs, bankruptcies, etc is difficult if not impossible in some cases.
I was speaking more in general terms than this specific instance. Take for example Broderbund:
- purchased by the learning company, which got bought by softkey
- combined company was sold to mattel
- mattel interactive was sold to gores technology group
- gores sold some to ubisoft and some to riverdeep
- products were published by encore under license from riverdeep
- riverdeep merged with houghton mifflin and later acquired harcourt to become houghton mifflin harcourt
- hmh went through two rounds of restructuring and a recapitalization
- encore went through some buying/selling/bankruptcy themselves
Who owns the IP? Did it survive all the way to hmh and stay through the restructurings?
I've looked up some bankruptcy records for other smaller software companies, and they've had hundreds of debtors, some of which themselves have since went bankrupt.
You can't say that and be sure. You don't know what the terms of those licenses are, nor do you know what the deal with ubi/riverdeep is. For all we know the ownership of the rights mightn't belong to any of the companies listed, and might belong to one of the people involved!
Of course we can't be sure who owns the IP. Doesn't mean we can't make an educated guess.
The OP is only trying to figure out whom to contact first about the IP. The worst that can happen is that a company replies it's not with them.
A merging/acquisition will transfer all IP to the (new) parent company. A contracting company will grant a license to make one game, not reassign all its IP to the game studio.
I don't think OPs guess is in any way educated. The whole point of this thread is that the rights for these games are complicated, and assuming that the most straightforward explanation is true is just wrong.
> A merging/acquisition will transfer all IP to the (new) parent company.
That's a bold statement that is definitely not always true. There are many reasons why it wouldn't happen, either the acquisition wasn't done properly, or maybe the IP might be kept to ensure any liability would fall on the acquired company.
>. A contracting company will grant a license to make one game, not reassign all its IP to the game studio.
Again, that's the most _likely_ explanation, but there are other very possible ones such as - the company who granted the rights to a contractor didn't have the rights to grant them in the first place, or they granted all rights to games of an IP (see EA and star wars), or some sort of right of first refusal.
If those people are still alive! Unfortunately, I found an obituary when looking up one bankruptcy asset owner: never married, only child, whose parents had died prior. No idea what next of kin looks like for that.
I remember having so much fun playing micromachines with, was it 8 people?, back in the day on the playstation one. We had an L-shaped extension, and we had to share a controller, using just left, right and brake. It was mayhem, and I think the reason I still have my google maps navigation with north always up!
Also, I happen to live in Birmingham and commute to Coventry. In the Birmingham museum and art gallery I was surprised to find an Amiga 500 used by the LSD demoscene group on display.
I would love to have an online upgraded version of micromachines today, but it would be so infested with micro transactions and loot boxes that I will probably lost interest.
Oh that would be cool! It could stay exactly the same as the original, but larger maps and some nice netcode. Someone did the same with webliero, it's an incredibly honest reproduction of the classic dos game, except with excellent multiplayer support that has given it new life.
Dizzy was one of my first favourites. "Immersive" would probably be an apt word for it. Amazing how much gameplay they could squeeze into available memory back then.
Think I played the first one on an Amstrad with the ol' green screen. They made a lot of decent games.
The thing I find most depressing is that it seems to me games are getting blander and blander as the size of the corporations that create them grows. Code masters games always had a sort of flavour of their own. It's happened to other british development shops like psygnosis (created wipeout, a game with a lot of personality ). Sony bought them and eventually closed them.
Well, for me Codemasters flavour is their way of fighting piracy by releasing extremely buggy games (which get pirated) and then releasing a good, playable version between one and six months later.
Also, very arcade racing games trying to pass as simulations.
As a car sim enthusiast I really hope their new owner realizes the mistake they made by making project cars 3 a clone of their other arcade racing games.
Totally off topic, but is there a thing about game studios and being in the middle of nowhere?
According to Wikipedia, Codemasters HQ is in Southam, which is a tiny town halfway attractive UK hotspots like Birmingham and Milton Keynes [0].
Similarly, Epic is in Cary, NC, a suburb of Raleigh. A bit less "middle of nowhere" than Southam maybe, but still, not particularly San Francisco or London either. What's up with that? Have game studios simply been remote longer? Or do gamedevs actually relocate en-masse to places like Southam and Cary for their jobs? How does this work? What's the employer pitch? "Sure, there's like one bar and half a supermarket, but you'll get to work on cool race games!"? (I'm not being dismissive, I'm genuinely curious if this is "a thing" and if so, how this works)
I worked for Codemasters in the late 90s when I was 18-19. I was trying to get out of menial work while teaching myself to code, and got a temp job as a games tester. I was "commuting" from one Warwickshire village to Southam, about 20-25 miles away.
To get to work I had to get a lift to a bus stop 4 miles away, where I'd catch a coach at about 7am that went cross country to Bristol. It would drop me off in Southam, then I'd walk for about half an hour to get to the Codemasters offices which were in remote converted farm buildings outside town.
On my first day I met a guy in Southam who said he worked there so I followed him. We had gone through several muddy fields before I saw that he was wearing wellington boots for the journey. I got to work covered in mud! Luckily nobody seemed to care or notice.
To get home, I'd get a ride back into Southam from a colleague, and wait in a pub for a couple of hours before catching the same coach I came in on. At that point I'd be in another town four miles from home. Then I'd go to a pub where my friends hung out and get a ride back with them. I'd get home about midnight.
I worked out I was losing money by working there, but I was desperate to get into the games industry and out of working class menial labour, so I carried on until my temp contract ran out. If I was more savvy I would have been able to finagle myself a permanent position, but honestly I was a pretty depressed, naïve kid at the time, and didn't really know what I was doing career wise.
Later I had a week long interview at another studio, Attention To Detail (who made Rollcage for the PS1) who were similarly remote. The other big game developer in the region was Blitz Games which was at least in Leamington Spa. I only had to get 2 buses to get to my interview there.
Former Blitzer here (early 2000s). I went for an interview at codies about 2010, and it had a really strange vibe. People talking in hushed tones in corridors, stuff like that. I completely bombed the interview, but would have declined the offer anyway. I heard bad things about overtime, not sure if it's changed in the last 10 years or not.
Ah, I almost got a job as a level designer at Blitz Games but I found out from an insider that they gave it to a guy who had done the exact thing at another company. They would have got me on board if he hadn't shown up.
All the game developers I applied to were incredibly slow in their communications. It would take weeks to arrange an interview and subsequently get a response back from them. I often thought, "Can I afford to take the time to apply to another games company?" Eventually I got into web dev with a couple of friends of mine, and work on games in my own time.
I think you did the right thing. Although game development was pretty fun at times, I feel like it had a negative effect on my programming career. There was no culture of learning, it was all about getting to the next release date in one piece!
There's a lot of reasoning here, and some of it makes sense. But a lot of the time it's just where the founders are from. In the 80s when the home-computer revolution was kicking off, a lot of the kids/young adults that got good at making games and made a fortune off the nascent industry then went off to set up development studios. They were often from the shires, because it was a wealthy/middle-class pursuit, or was at least easier to get going when the family support machine was backing you.
The low pay thing I think is a misnomer, I worked in games from 1995-2005, and although yeah the pay wasn't great compared to other industries, it wasn't bad, and I worked full-time for three different London based studios and contracted for another two. It was certainly enough to live in London (at least then before the property market went crazy)
This is the closest answer. I was there. Codies actually got its start in a small light industrial unit in Banbury, about 20 miles down the road, but when the Darling family bought a run-down farm in Southam we all (well, probably less than 10 people at that point) relocated to some hastily renovated stables there. I don’t think it was ever anticipated to be a huge employment hub. That just sort of happened. We gradually grew a crop of portable buildings out the back to accommodate all the programmers that came to work on special projects as the company moved beyond the budget games market, and a small team of builders were on site for literally years gradually converting outbuildings and improving the house etc. There were no other developers around, save for Archer McLean who coincidentally lived a couple of fields away. The Leamington-centric games dev community all grew out of Codies. I expect that’s a good part of why the boys picked up CBEs a few years ago.
According to Google maps, Southam is about 25 minutes drive to Coventry or 15 minutes to Leamington Spa. It's not in the "middle of nowhere" in any important sense.
And Leamington is quite attractive - not a bad place to live. Coventry is probably ok too. Personally I would much rather be in a town like Leamington Spa than Birmingham or Milton Keynes. In general, small and medium size towns in the UK are far nicer than the big cities.
Yeah, once you're outside cities, most non-retail businesses tend to be found on the outskirts of towns (in business parks) or further out than that. My dad would usually drive 25-30 minutes to get to his office, so 15 minutes from Leamington is basically nothing.
Remote can mean isolated and disconnected as much as faraway and distant. Plenty of the UK is remote in that sense. I work in a part of Surrey where, despite there being frequent trains to London, the actual town and surrounding area is very hard to get around without a car (and the public transport options there are are significantly less frequent than trains away from the place).
Infrastructure is as much a factor as proximity I'd say.
I have worked in Coventry for a year and I stayed in Birmingham as the hotels in Coventry and area are depressing. As the restaurant options are much better in Birmingham compared to Coventry.
Did enjoy the small Chinese place in the city centre though :)
Also Leamington has a few big developers too(Ubisoft has a studio there) so it's not like it's a complete games development desert out there - there is big industry around.
I'm mostly guessing here, but I'd say it's because a lot of these companies were probably founded by a couple of mates back in the 8/16-bit Acorn/Commodore/Atari era and just stayed where they were.
I guess that it also helps a lot if there is little else around to distract kids from computers. There are a lot more things to throw your youthful enthusiasm at in a place with significant nightlife (that isn't the pub you share with your dad and his dad)
Gaming companies generally have a surplus of potential employees. These employees will do a lot to work in the gaming industry (see crunch time, lower pay, etc, etc.). So employees will move to where the companies are.
If you look at older companies they're often headquartered in second or third tier areas. Not middle of nowhere but also not the hip city. Seattle wasn't a hot place when Microsoft started there. South Bay (Google, Yahoo, etc, etc.) is pretty desolate compared to San Francisco and an 45 minute drive away. However commercial rent is cheaper and there's room to expand over time.
It's only companies that don't have good ways of pulling in employees that tend to locate in the hip areas as they need every advantage they can get.
edit: Also if your employees are older and with kids then they value more than living in the "hip" places. They want a nice calm suburban location with good schools.
It's certainly been a pattern for a while. Rare (obviously long since part of MGS) were/are based near Twycross, and Sierra Online were based in MFN long before it was cool.
Many years ago I once had to visit Rare for work and was surprised by the security. I wonder if part of it is that they aren't going to be visited by a constant stream of fans if they're harder to reach/find. From outside the gates it was totally un-obvious that it was the HQ of one of the most influential game dev studios of the 80s and 90s.
That being said, plenty of companies are still based in reasonably sized towns: Jagex and Frontier are both in a science park on the edge of Cambridge, EA in Guildford certainly used to be and maybe still are in an otherwise normal business park.
I remember years ago being approached about a job for a company in Exeter, a town stuck out on the western tip of England, with no possibility of remote. The job required very specific tech skills. When I told the recruiter I had no intention of moving to Exeter, he said glumly "that's what everyone says, but the client is dead set against remote". Nothing against Exeter, I've heard it's a nice place to visit, but I kind of wondered what galaxy-brain thinking was going on there.
Exeter is a very livable small city (130k people) in a lovely part of the country. I'm not saying you should have uprooted your life to move there, but for many people it would be a great lifestyle move.
There's a wider issue with UK businesses being a bit unambitious, and staying in locations where availability of employees affects their ability to grow. But there are far worse places than Devon.
Not a bad place by any means, but employers can't have it both ways. If they want to stay in a location where people aren't likely to move to, that's fine, but then they have to accept that remote is the only way they'll attract people with the skills they need.
Small hotspots appear where people leave companies, start their own and don't want to move.
Guildford is such a place for games in the UK. Yes, it's not too far from London but it's also fairly suburban. That sprung from Bullfrog/Lionhead, I guess. Hello Games, Criterion and Media Molecule are all based there.
The most famous example is the Seattle/Redmond area, where that hotspot sprung from Microsoft.
I expect with the likes of Guildford it's also something of an economic decision. Less expensive than being based in London, while being reasonably connected to potentially catch some of that workforce and being accessible enough for those travelling from overseas for business.
Game studios provide shitty salaries while at the same time having a dearth of talent available (because, game dev, dude...). By having offices in low cost of living places, they can maintain this equilibrium without raising wages.
An excolleague of mine worked for codemasters in the mid 90s, apparently codemasters was originally started by two brothers in a barn near their house. As the company took off they expanded and build upon the barn, ultimately absorbing it into the building it became. It was explained to me that you could still see support structures from the original barn with the office building itself.
So in this case it seems like a literal physical expansion of the classic garage coder idea.
Yes, the potted history is Galactic Software (selling games from hand-drawn ads in Popular Computing Weekly) when they were still at school in Somerset, then worked with Mirrorsoft and Mastertronic in London, then off to start Codemasters in Banbury.
DMA Design (which later became Rockstar North, developers of Grand Theft Auto) were formed in Dundee. Not exactly the middle of nowhere, but probably not where you'd expect to find one of the world's most popular video game franchises.
In the UK, curiously, the seaside / holiday town of Bournemouth has become somewhat of a hotspot for the CGI industry, with the local university hosting the National Centre for Computer Animation.
The Raleigh/Durham area is very car-centric, and Epic is right next to the interstate highway. It's intended that you'll arrive by car, probably via the highway -- which is relatively easy whether you live in Cary, in downtown Raleigh, or somewhere else.
In my twenties, I remember attending a swing dance workshop in Durham. It was very well attended; the instructors had recently moved from San Francisco and had been pioneers in the swing dance community there.
At the time I didn't understand how one could be riding high in San Francisco and want to leave. But people who relocate to Raleigh/Durham often say that they move for the nice weather, for the low cost of living, for the fact that it offers a lot of culture while being fairly laid back.
I used to work for Sony Computer Entertainment at the EU HQ in London, there were a few games studios there, all located around the same street just off Oxford Circus, along with a big R&D office.
I think the London Studio is still there, not sure what they are working on now though.
King who make candy crush are near there too, I went for a job interview with them around 6 years ago, you could tell at that time, judging by the offices, they were not strapped for cash...
Biased as I went there, but that's very close to the University of Warwick. I studied Maths, and then went into Software Engineering in London, but a lot of the CS grads went into local game studios like Codemasters.
"Coventry & Warwickshire has a globally significant gaming cluster which is one of the largest in the UK. The ‘Silicon Spa’ cluster employs over 2000 highly skilled people, equating to over 10% of the UK total in games development."
Take-Two gets massive subsidies to make "british games". Namely the "british cultural game" Grand Theft Auto. How!? Yes, how is GTA a british game? Well you see Take-Two bought Rockstar, which itself was a formerly a fully UK owned company.
Now Take-Two has turned around and is buying out one of the UK's few remaining publishers. No doubt the UK will now pay Take-Two yet more generous subsidies to keep Codemasters running.
The UK government is literally taxing domestic industries to subsidize an over seas corporation to further buy out UK industry. This is not a cohesive plan. The last thing the UK needs is to hollow out yet more industry.