You may have heard that Electronic Arts is considering opening a large studio in Georgia, either in Atlanta or Savannah. Many of us in the area had heard rumblings about this, but the Atlanta Business Chronicle filed the first official story on the matter late last week.
Georgia has offered tax incentives for film production for many years, and a few years back the state extended similar breaks to games. The tax credits are significant—up to 30% of salaries and services paid in the state. As the article suggests, a lower cost of living and access to talent at schools like Georgia Tech and SCAD offer good reasons to choose the region, but it is the incentives that provide the primary motivation for a company like EA.
What the article doesn’t mention is the fact that companies must spend over $500k per project to take advantage of the credits, effectively making the incentives appeal only to large corporate relocation or satellite office openings like EA. The incentives certainly aren’t set up to encourage or support small business growth in the sector.
Along those lines, perhaps the most candid reaction to the announcement comes from Todd Harris, COO of Hi-Rez Studios, an MMO company based in the north Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta.
With its reputation for churning out new versions of proven franchises, said Harris of Hi-Rez Studios, EA would be a good match for the “young, hungry talent” graduating from Georgiaâ??s game development programs who would thrive in more defined roles.
I don’t want to speak for the graduates of the programs I teach in, but somehow I hope that their unfed talent rumbles for something more than “churning out new versions of proven franchises.”
Instead, perhaps we should look to the Atlanta music industry as a more healthy model for local development, both in cultural and economic terms. Atlanta is sometimes called “the new Motown” thanks to its history culturing a new generation of hip-hop and R&B artists. The result has been a more organic growth of both talent itself as well as the production business to support it.
Certainly the 2006 merger of Eve Online developer CCP and local role-playing studio White Wolf follows more in this tradition than it does that of the drudgeworker who lines the pockets of his master.
After all, that’s hardly the metaphor of labor we need to return to in the American South.