There isn’t much to do in the North of England apart from mining, being poor and having comedic accents. Which is probably why many of the major cities try desperately to cling onto some hope they aren’t sink holes of all that is bad in British culture and try to promote local rivalries. One such geographical competition is between Liverpool and the much better Manchester.
I only bring this up now as Liverpool are looking to build a new £5million “games academy” that will hopefully be on par with the planned video game “centre of excellence” being built on the outskirts of Manchester as part of MediaCity.
Liverpool’s Enterprise leader, Gary Millar, said that Liverpool “is the UK’s leading games developer catalyst” and that the city “[needs] to capitalise on that.” He also added that he doesn’t know what form the academy would take and that he and the group behind the project still need to “beef up” the plans. He was however sure about the price, saying that he didn’t think they “would get much change from £5m to get this up and running.”
I was pleased to see they have also already been working in plans to have this new site and the one being built at Manchester’s (well, OK, Salford’s) MediaCity linked together. I guess the plan is to provide a rather impressive backbone for video game education within the UK games industry, hopefully stemming the tide of skilled workers going overseas.
The weekly calls from the UK games industry to the Government for tax breaks seem to be falling on deaf ears these days, so maybe a bit more interest can be raised by the mention of “millions of pounds” or “large groups of employed happy people”. Two things the government is in need of right now.
Via: Develop
“One such geographical competition is between Liverpool and the much better Manchester.”
BIAS.
Ha! Brighton beats both those grim northern cities!