Osborne announces tax breaks for UK games industry

Shocking stuff. The Conservatives have done something …. good!?

Glad to hear it. Here’s hoping they don’t come with conditions…

Don’t be fooled. This is great news, but George Osbourne is an insane person with no more right to live on God’s clean earth than a weasel.

Finally.

@2 I hear that!

Could somebody please explain what this means for us consumers?

“George Osbourne is an insane person with no more right to live on God’s clean earth than a weasel.”

Bit of a sideswipe at the poor old weasel community, there.

How @2 how dare you compare him with a weasel, weasels have necks he’s more of an inbred closet child of the aristocracy.

But this is good

Give the man some credit. If those arse holes at Labour did this, that bankers bonus tax would probably be wheeled out AGAIN to pay for everything they want to do.Bunch of tits.

@5 – Its about investing in jobs. The UK had a strong development scene but most of those jobs have gone abroad. However, the UK is now setting up smart phone developers across the UK and it needs to have some kind of support.

After all, the games industry did bring in more than film production, which have enjoyed some tax relief for some time. Level playing field and its about time

@2 As I say, will be interesting to see if they are true tax breaks for all companies or just little faux ones.

Bit more in there now. It’s due to be introduced by next April subject to state approval.

Great news but I’m gonna stay dubious. Agreeing with Pat about Georgie O being insane.

Huzzah! Finally, we’ll be back on the map.

Will this affect me? (indie dev, working part time)

Tax breaks for videogames!

Fucking over the NHS!

BRITAIN!

@14 Bloody right.

As of April we are losing £100 per month from child tax credit and I’ll be paying an extra £50 per month towards my NHS pension (of which I still have another 32 years to pay). So my family is £150 worse off per month even before we get to fuel prices and the general increase in the cost of living.

As much as I love gaming I also like feeding my family or trying not to have an increasing negative bank balance each month.

To say I’m angry is a gross understatement.

@15 if you are losing Child Tax Credits, then it is because you are already earning over £50k it that’s the case you have nothing to complain about. Get a grip

He changed the Child Tax Credits from a HOUSEHOLD income of £50k to an individuals income of over £50k

@5, nothing. It’s about the government realising too late that other countries have built successful games industries by doing similar things years ago.

@16. We are a single income family not a joint income family so I certainly dont earn 50K. After tax and deductions the family income is £24000 pretty much on the nose. So thank you for the advice to get a grip. Also I believe you are confusing child benefit and child tax credit.

To those launching attacks on Osborne’s record as Chancellor ask yourselves these questions. Did you attack Gordon “I’ve abolished the laws of economics” Brown when he was spending billions we didn’t have, inflating a massive property bubble, encouraging people to take on as much debt as they could accumulate, raiding £100 billion from private pension funds, raising the state pension by the smallest amount ever, saddling hospitals with billions in PFI debt (so some now spend more on debt payments than on patient care), scrapping the 10p tax rate (making the working poor poorer) and reducing capital gains tax (so millionaires and billionaires could pay 20p in the pound instead of 40p)? Did you react with disgust when Liam Byrne, Labour’s outgoing Chief Secretary to the Treasury, left a note for his coalition successor joking “sorry … there’s no money left”? He knew massive cuts and an age of forced austerity were coming, and he thought it was funny. Did you react with outrage when billions were wasted on massive projects both not required and doomed to fail (NHS IT, FiRe Control to name just two totalling over £12 billion at conservative estimates).

As for the 50p tax rate, if Labour think it so important why did it take them 13 years and six weeks before an election they expected to lose to come up with the idea – and then delay its introduction until AFTER that election? The 50p rate was never about economics, it is about politics: a toxic gift for the coalition which is working a TREAT.

Osborne’s not perfect, but he’s a damned sight better than the economically-illiterate morons who drove our country head first into a brick wall. No Chancellor in modern times has faced a challenge like this.

As a man with a small family I can empathise with the likes of Golden. But I blame the man who caused this mess, not the man trying to sort it out. I want our bills settled now by the generation that ran them up, not left for my children to pay off.

/rant

@19
RIGHT. ON.

@19, I don’t really blame George Osborne or Gordon Brown exclusively for the state of the nations financials.

The Labour Government made inept decisions, no denying it, but I personally question the Government’s motives for its fiscal policy and decisions. Are they in the best interest of the country? Or are they in the best interest of their rich buddies and financial backers? I seriously, seriously question that.

Regardless, the true culprit is the electoral system that allows minority Governments to make majority decisions.

Oh, and this nation elected to keep that system guaranteeing at least another generation of unfair governments. Bravo.

@21 I think the root cause is that money is fiat currency and can be magicked out of thin air, when really you need to produce something first in order to get paid afterward

Can all of you ignorant, money grabbing, gold digging bastards please shut the f*ck up.

Complaining you are so much worse off than everyone else. Have you not forgotten this country and other have been at war with “terror” for over TEN years now (for the most part in two different countries).

And you lot blindly blame other things for the downfall of the economy… Iraq alone cost the USA over 3 TRILLION DOLLARS!!! What do you think it cost us!???

There are people out there fighting for their countries and for what? Why should we be the protectors of the world. We should be focusing on our own country first and then worry about the others. Today alone SIX peoples families were torn apart because of the stupidity of our government.

Have some god damn respect for your selves and stop being so ignorant, self obsessed, we are in this mess together.

@ Golden, at least you have a job with a good salary, and you aren’t one of the millions like me also that have lost their job and cant feed themselves let alone their kids. At least you house is not being repossessed and your not being forced to sleep in a car or on a park bench. Or even worse still your not getting shot at or blown up at 19 years of age just because some tells you to.

@23, it cost us 20 billion as of 2010, granted that sounds like a lot of money, but over 10 years and in comparison to the national budget it’s not really, so if you want to blame our economic woes on the wars in the Middle East I think you’d be quite ignorant to do so.