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Wedgwood: Development in the UK was 'like a workhouse'
Ed Fear Aug 26 2008, 11:20am
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Splash Damage founder suggests Britsoft teams should emulate success of US independents
Paul Wedgwood, owner and founder of Splash Damage, has described the UK's development industry at the turn of the century as "unprofessional" and "like a workhouse".
Speaking to Develop in an exclusive in-depth article about Splash Damage's road from mod team to Develop Award-winning independent studio, Wedgwood explained how the studio's unique benefit system - which sees employees given stakeholder pensions, health insurance, gym membership and more - was born from being dissatisfied with the UK's attitude to development when compared to the US.
“Our thinking was that, at the time – 2001 or 2002 – I think the British games industry had a reputation for being a bit… crap.
They were working over launderettes, or in their bedrooms; it was quite unprofessional. There was this image that people in the games industry were society’s dropouts.
“We didn’t like that idea – we’d been to the US and seen companies like Ritual, Gearbox and id, and to us it seemed like the game development industry was seen as better in the US. People sat in cool chairs in cool offices surrounded by action figures – it was nothing like the UK’s approach, which was more like a workhouse.”
For more on Splash Damage's rise to fame, including how it courted its close relationship from id and how its success came from previous failure, check out the full article here.
Comments
“It never used to be like this... honest”
Posted by: Jon Hare - Aug 27, 12:03pm
It makes me cry that people form other countries see our development houses like this now.
Before we were raped by the big media companies and had our hands tied by our own brain dead governement as soon as Labour came ineo power we had some great games development companies.
Companies like Sensible, Team 17 and the Bitmap Brothers were a million miles away from workhouses.
At Sensible ALL of our staff were on ROYALTIES for all products they worked on, we shared our success with our people in very relaxed offices with felxible hours. The only thing we demanded was quality work.
It all went pear shaped when lots of new companies came in on the scene all at once, most of whom had no idea what they were doing and allowed themselves to be shafted by the new publishing companies. This created the platform for the nasty sort of shovelware being created in unhappy surroundings that Mr Wedgwood observes today.
I wonder when Blair and Brown are long gone if they will even stop for one second to consider the damage they have done to small businesses in our country. And how can we expect americans or people from other countries to understand this. What other country would openly encourage the decimation and discouragement of our creative, skilled workers to a point where we now actually have a shortage of engineers (Mr Dyson of vacuum cleaner fame has discussed this recently).
So I would invite Mr Wedgwood to revsit us on 20 years time when we have become the 51st state of the superpower that is India. Perhaps then he might see an improvement.