Psygnosis and England in general was a big player in the video game industry in the 90s, a bit sad that it went away since mid 00s.
Maybe if the various English companies had converged, instead of selling to foreign interests, they could have survived.
it seems true. the europeans were a force to be reckoned with in terms of gaming during the atari st/amiga/early pc era. i suspect a lot of that talent went to one of two places: 1) they jumped ship for the crazy financial opportunities abroad 2) they stayed put, but started throwing more and more energy at the nascent and newly internet enabled open source scene
i've never seen any official numbers, but have always gotten the sense that the europeans these days are the real power players in the oss world. (much like they were in games before!). it also makes sense, i think that pre-industrialized gaming attracted creative coders, much like oss does today.
The UK's early talent advantages and successes in gaming were brought about by a combination of heavy investment in computer education at a national level and a market structured to support the marginal(the ZX Spectrum was an extraordinary price sensitive market - cheap machines, cheap tape media, "budget" game pricing), but once the games got bigger, most of those companies were quickly reduced to subsidiary roles since they weren't able to make the same big bets on production, and this reflects the dynamic across tech in Europe generally: it's just harder to build a big business.
I do suspect you're right about the dynamic with open source as well. Programmers who are purely mercenary have tended to gravitate towards the orbit of SV for the past twenty years, but Europe offers more opportunities for career open source.
Eh, it depends. A lot of the work is definitely carried out by Europeans (particularly around KDE and Linux kernel), but when it comes to actually setting priorities, it's the likes of IBM, RedHat, Canonical, and Google, who draw the real roadmaps - and those are basically all US-based businesses.
You can observe that in the privileged position GNOME continues to enjoy, when KDE is historically much more relevant in Europe.
This. Linux is not where it is today just thanks to some passionate geeks doing charity work in their spare time but mostly thanks to the billions the likes of Sun, Oracle, Google, Alibaba, Red-Hat, IBM, SAP, Intel, Cloudflare, SGI(RIP), that have poured billions over the last decades into linux and all accompanying modules like filesystems, desktop environments, networking, etc.
All this was possible thanks to those evil megacorp bucks.