Election 2011 Games

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I wonder if that game has even been developed in Ireland

Yep, but the irony is the game is about getting Ireland working, and then they employ an American company as opposed to using an Irish one

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/20525-randd-tax-relief-to-boost/

There is a belief (whether justified or not) that the games industry can become significant in Ireland. Developers should make the most of supports and incentives.

I want to say a huge thanks to thane and socksup for mentioning us in this thread. It really makes us feel great to know that we are being taken seriously – It’s sometimes hard to take for us, considering how fast things are growing. They really need to begin supporting the Home-Grown, I mean our goal now is obviously to keep making games, create jobs and grow our company but at the same time we also want to inspire the upcoming graduates and students of the present to think about starting their own game development companies.

The problem is we are growing, we are going to need bigger offices and more staff and we have still received very little assistance from the government/enterprise sectors in relation to this. We are kind of lucky that we have made it out of one of the worst danger zones (the first year) but the fact of the matter is that if we are to grow we need support and with all this talk, I can still only see these politicians looking to bring in big multinationals who wont open videogame development studios here, instead they will open localisation centers and tech support offices. Once again our game development graduates will still have to move off to find work…

This whole matter gets me annoyed, so I’m going to stop talking about it.
If any of you are around for Games Fleadh on the 9th and 10th we will be there and giving a gamespro talk about the struggles we’ve endured in our first year and where we are heading from here on out…

All the best,

Paddy M.
CEO, Open Emotion Studios Ltd.

I spoke briefly with Olivia Mitchell of Fine Gael recently. She said that FG was going support small businesses more. When I mentioned that a lot of entrepreneurs I had talked to weren’t that happy with Enterprise Ireland, she said FG was aware of the critizism, and that on their website were plans to reorganize it to make it better at it’s intended goal.

Just saw that…did a quick bit of maths. if there was 5 people making 60K a year in an office in each of the 32 counties, that’d still be less than 10million euro…..wonder what the money is going on?

Can’t really complain too much as they did give me a 5K grant when I tried a start up (only claimed half as we didn’t last long enough for the second half) but you’d have to wonder just where the money is going?

there must be more detail in the annual report including trade missions, taking companies to trade shows etc.

Anyone have time to comb through the report some more?

Also do note that they offered a scheme just before Christmas for Internet and games companies so lets see how many other schemes there are ..

Aphra.

In fairness to them, they were very excited about what we were proposing, we just couldn’t pull it off the ground. They seem to recognise IT as the thing they should be investing in. If anyone is thinking of starting a games company, do approach them, they will be very helpful