The UK and Irish Game Industries - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 103

for acquisition fi rst by Gremlin interactive in 1997, then Infogrames and
fi nally Rockstar Games and New York-based Take Two in 1999. David
Jones meanwhile left the company to spin out a new company, Real Time
Worlds, in 2002, also located in Dundee, which after some successful proj-
ects went into liquidation in 2010. This cycle of acquisition, spin-outs,
growth and decline is nothing new in the games industry, but perhaps
the impact by 2010 was greater given that Real Time Worlds employed
over three hundred people in Dundee and the game project that it had just
launched had received up to $100 million in investment.
Internationally the 2000s saw the rise of Sony's PlayStation and Micro-
soft's Xbox consoles alongside Nintendo's Wii. These three operated along-
side increasingly U.S. and Japanese-based independent publishers, often
with roots in traditional media industries. Increasing technological pos-
sibilities and larger projects with larger development teams, costs and risks
saw the further consolidation of publishing through mergers and acquisi-
tions. Meanwhile massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), mobile
and social/browser platforms emerged as new routes to market. In Britain
the history of DMA Design and Real Time Worlds was replicated over and
over with the rise and decline, or acquisition, of major British develop-
ment studios and publishers (Eidos, Rare, Codemasters, DMA/Rockstar,
Lionhead). The top ten selling console and personal computer games in
the UK were increasingly tie-ins to other media and real-world properties,
and successful titles were developed into franchises, usually by publishers
headquartered outside the UK. The Entertainment Leisure Software Pub-
lishers Association (ELSPA) was established as a trade body for publishers
in 1989, and two years later a separate body, TIGA, was established to rep-
resent the interests of developers. The fact that there was a division between
their interests can be linked back to the restructuring of the industry and
the increased role of U.S. and Japanese publishers.
Meanwhile, Ireland never developed a strong home-grown develop-
ment industry. A history of foreign direct investment meant that foreign-
owned arcade factories and major animation studios established branches
in the 1980s, and in the 1990s the Norwegian-owned company Funcom
developed PlayStation One games in Dublin. By 2001 this studio had
closed as the company switched resources to its new MMOG, Anarchy
Online . Micro-companies developing mobile and web projects existed,
but predominantly the Irish industry revolved around support services
including localization, marketing and customer support for Europe (e.g.
Microsoft, Vivendi, Sony). A key exception was the development of origi-
nal IP in technology and in particular the development of two middleware
companies (Havok and Demonware), both university spin-out companies
and both acquired within less than a decade by multinational corpora-
tions (Kerr 2002).
In these countries the last decade saw universities and colleges establish
undergraduate and postgraduate courses in game technology and design,