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Comment by Danieru | Hacker News Reader

This is not fair to the British people.

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.

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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.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/oct/02/revealed-globa...

Where are the subsidies coming from though? I'm not aware of any gaming subsidy from hmrc

Straight from the tax department: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claiming-video-games-tax-relief-...

Notice how the site claims cultural "British-ness" to be a requirement. Yet in reality GTA V passed this apparently low barrier.

More likely the British-ness requirement is nothing more than a fig-leaf to appease the European Commission.

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.

GTA 6 - Britain, cast of players from Snatch (movie), and one star cops being unarmed, would be a fun game tho.

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.

The newest Watch Dogs is set in London, I believe. I've only watched the trailer, though.

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.

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.

[0]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7372117.stm

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Abz1xWpb3FU

Blame the game, not the player. TakeTwo is not responsible for a bad UK policy - the UK government is.

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!

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