TIGA CEO Richard Wilson has warned that the UK government ignores Ireland's ongoing drive to attract developers at its peril.
A report issued earlier this week by Ireland's policy advisory board for enterprise and science Forfas set out recommendations to double the size of the Irish game industry's workforce within three years.
"It's not far to go to Dublin, is it?" Wilson told us when we suggested that Ireland represents a potential Canada-style brain drain for UK talent. "If [Ireland] did get their act together, you could see developers shifting over there and indeed a number of studios. And of course the Irish have got a very strong track record in being very aggressive in terms of creating a nice financial environment for businesses to set up - look at the 12.5 per cent tax rate. We ignore them at our peril."
Putting the ambitious recommendations into context, Wilson highlighted the "ghastly" recession Ireland has been through, and the fact that the country has fewer key decision makers thanks to its smaller population, as factors behind its ability to reach consensus around key economic and industrial policies more quickly than the UK. But he doesn't see the UK's larger size as an excuse for the comparative lack of action from its government.
"[In the UK] there's been a huge amount of dithering and a lot of backward sliding about previous promises and not a great deal has been done," he said. "We have a fantastic, highly skilled work force [but] we do have some skill shortages. The key problem is that we haven't had a fiscal system that has supported the UK game development sector, and the interventions that we've had in the UK have been very limited.
"I think it's time for ministers to really wake up and take some action here. We've basically had economic stagnation for the last 12 months. We know from our own research that the number of game developers in the UK has declined over the past two years while Canada has soared ahead. And now we have Ireland next door which is taking serious steps to create a strong environment for game development."
He went on to stress that action was required now if the UK is to avoid further stagnation.
"There's nothing for the UK government to lose here - tax breaks for game production won't cost a great deal of money, and yet it would have a significant impact on the UK game industry in terms of helping new studio formation and help encouraging investment in the UK.
"At the moment we have a lot of talk about how we need to rebalance the economy away from financial services, but not a great deal of action."
Earlier in the week, UK minister for culture, communications and creative industries Ed Vaizey called for a "computer science revolution" in schools in order to halt the declining number of computer science graduates and "badly taught" ICT curriculum.
For our latest Region Specific feature we visited Dublin to find out how the city’s finest development talent is bucking global financial trends.