Joe Robertson

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I am grateful to the Members who have spoken passionately about this issue, in particular the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Ben Goldsborough), who led the debate, and to the people who signed the petition. Video games are a significant part of the entertainment and creative industries and give pleasure to millions. As we have heard, they have a cultural relevance today that was perhaps not seen in previous generations. The lazy stereotype of a sector dominated by teenagers is far from reality: research has found that one in six adults in the UK regularly plays video games. If we include under-18s, there are currently 40 million gamers across the UK. Franchises such as “Call of Duty”, “FIFA” and “Assassin’s Creed” attract millions of players and have production values and graphics that earlier generations of gamers could barely dream of. The UK can be proud of its video games industry, which is the largest in Europe. “Grand Theft Auto” and “Tomb Raider” are just two of the most significant examples to come out of the UK games creative industry. Some estimates suggest that the UK games market could reach £8 billion by 2027, which would be more than the UK film industry today. That is why the previous Conservative Government took measures to support the video games industry and created the £13.4 million UK games fund, which supported the acceleration of growth in the UK games sector between 2022 and 2025. An independent 2025 review of the UK games fund estimated that overall, “the current three-year iteration of the UKGF will generate in the range of £30m to £58m in productivity benefits for the UK economy due to salary uplifts for supported video game developers.” The previous Government also set up the right economic environment to create the conditions for growth, including the announcement in the spring 2023 Budget that video games expenditure credit would be introduced from 1 January last year. VGEC is calculated directly from qualifying expenditure and has a credit rate of 34%, which provides a greater benefit than the earlier video games tax relief. Turning to the issue raised by the petition, the Stop Killing Games campaign did a tremendous job of raising awareness of video games publishers disabling, discontinuing or removing access to parts, or in some cases the entirety, of their games. Some Members in this Chamber have a favourite video game, some of which we have heard about, and they in particular will understand just how frustrating and disappointing it would be not to be able to play that game again. In a perfect world, everyone would have access to their favourite games forever, but this is not a perfect world. We need to strike a balance between consumer interests and the burdens on some video games producers. We need to tread carefully, and in particular avoid introducing changes that would increase the cost to successful video games companies of supporting older games with a declining number of players. That money might otherwise be spent on developing newer, better games. However, we have heard anecdotal evidence today of games being withdrawn without obvious reason, despite seeming to generate considerable profits and have a considerable number of consumers.