[PIGMI] Activision Blizzard lobbying for new R&D tax changes

[Dan Venkitachalam]

>From what I know of the Canadian scene (admittedly very little) - most of
the incentives are provided by the provincial governments.  This is why so
much activity has sprung up in Montreal in the past few years.  British
Columbia has been improving their incentives to individual companies,
Ubisoft recently opened an office in Vancouver and were recruiting in large
numbers when I left.

The Vancouver game dev scene is considerably larger than Perth and there was
a lot of cross-pollination between related industries (web, social
networking, education, film).  The big monthly indie game meetups (
fullindie.com) regularly drew over 100 people, to the point they were
finding it hard to find a large enough venues to host everyone.

It didn't get there overnight.  I think Vancouver had the advantage of
having a large critical mass of people involved in creative industries as
well as a pool of technical talent .  EA was probably a large part of that.
 And likely predated any incentive schemes to grow the industry there.


Dan.

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 5:14 PM, Brendan Ragan <lordmortis at gmail.com> wrote:

> Other than a few things that Kat said below, this is a possible reason why
> Canada may not be looking so good:
>
> Unemployment is currently at 7.8%
> http://www.hrmguide.net/canada/jobmarket/canadian-unemployment.htm
> Their Deficit in the 2010 budget is $49.2 Billion (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Canadian_federal_budget) (They've been
> running deficits since 2008 and the total debts are up at $500-600 million
> now)
>
> The Harper government is conservative and is less likely to approve such
> tax cuts than the current australian layout (mainly because of the large
> influence the greens and independents have - it's likely they will sell said
> cuts to the independents as something that could be shoved out in the bush (
> a.la the bunbury technology park that's happening here in WA))
>
> Another thing to remember is: These companies don't, generally, make the
> majority of their income in Australia. They make it overseas - they don't
> pay *all* that much of their tax here.
>
> As for Kat's comments below: Hey, at least it's only really hot for 2
> months of the year, the rest of it's pretty good :) Most people would take
> 40 above for a few days instead of 40 below for weeks :P (Of course
> Vancouver isn't like this..)
>
>
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