Interviews// Miles Jacobson, Part 1

SPOnG: You guys are one of the big names in the UK development industry now. What's your take on the state of the country's industry? There's talk of it being in disarray; and the necessity of tax breaks. What are your thoughts?

Miles Jacobson: It's not in disarray. It's difficult – it's tough for us in the UK because there is definitely more support in other countries from governments towards the games industry. It's becoming harder and harder to retain talent.

From a business perspective, if someone gets ridiculous tax breaks, that means they can offer to pay higher salaries, because their costs are lower. So, they can artificially inflate things to steal people from the country, and that is a big concern.

Even though we are part of SEGA, we are not moving from London. There is no pressure on us to move to a different country, we are an English-based studio that is a division of a Japanese-owned company once you go through the chain. But we're still British and we're very proud of the fact that we're a British studio.

But someone was asking me the other day – somebody who's moving over for personal reasons, from the States to London – if most of the studios were in London, or easily commutable by London. There's shitloads. There's ourselves, there's Media Molecule, Creative Assembly, Rockstar London, Sony London, Sony Cambridge, Ninja Theory, David Braben's Frontier Studios.

Down in Brighton you've got Black Rock, Relentless... plus you've got studios like Hello Games, all the Guildford lot – you've got Lionhead there, Criterion, Bright Light... Just around the corner from me you've got the guys who do Rolando, Hand Circus, plus Paulina Bozek's new studio.

There are so many studios, and the quality of the products that come out of them is astounding. I've missed out loads of developers there in that list as well, like Kuju... and that's just in the London area! You go further afield and you find Team17, all the different Rockstar studios and the amount of teams that are up there in Dundee. Eutechnyx, Rebellion...

It's crazy on such a small island to have, what I think – if you look at it historically – more successful studios than probably the whole of the US.


SPOnG: It's a far cry from the 'death knell' that a lot of industry folks seem to be ringing, then?

Miles Jacobson: It's really difficult, on a financial basis, being in the UK at the moment. But for creative talent, and the games that come out, I still believe the UK does it better than anyone else. We might not be grossing as much as everyone else, because some of our stuff is more specialist.

For example, Football Manager... can we even describe ourselves as a AAA title anymore? We do between one and one and a half million units a year with each of our games, and it's an annual iteration. Rockstar couldn't make a game for that many sales. So, we are very successful in our niche, and we do pretty well out of it, but we're not maybe as mainstream as some.

I think you see a lot more of the blockbuster-type games coming out of the US, whereas a lot of stuff that comes out of the UK is better quality – maybe doesn't sell as many, but it doesn't need to. Much like the film and music industry really. Creatively, it's not dying here, but we do need help.


SPOnG: Football Manager is a bit of a specialist series, like you said. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you do a lot of motion capture for the games now, right?

Miles Jacobson: No, we don't! It's a strange thing actually, that the original mocap data that we had from Virtua Striker, we've tweaked that quite a bit. And we've nicked some from another SEGA studio, to help us with some player movement stuff, but we haven't done any extra mocap. We're kind of waiting to get a free studio, because one of the SEGA studios has mocap stuff built in, but they've been very busily using it at the moment. Hopefully we'll get some time in there next year to take some new recordings.