56 GENIUS INTERVIEW George Osborn
deal Brexit. We drew a lot upon Jas Purewal’s background and his expertise as a games industry lawyer, and also upon a number of volunteers who have been supporting our organisation to help produce a clear and, in our opinion, measured analysis of what would happen.
WITH A NO DEAL BREXIT… THE EUROPEAN UNION WOULD HAVE TO TREAT US AS A THIRD COUNTRY WITH AN UNCERTAIN DATA STANDARD
FEED: So tell us what some of those things that could happen
are. What’s the big problem?
surcharge, which is about £200, and a further immigration charge. UKIE’s report estimated the cost of hiring employees who are outside of the free movement area at roughly £10,000 per employee. Everyone has been talking about GDPR and making sure we were compliant and that our businesses were ready for it. But the big concern with a no deal Brexit is that regarding data, we would now be considered a third country. Even though we played an integral role in what has gone into GDPR, and agreeing to those regulations, the European Union would have to treat us as a third country with an uncertain data standard. That could lead to disruption of data flows, and disrupted data flows could mean disruption to services. It could be disruptions for streaming services, or it could mean that in things like multiplayer games, UK players have to be hived off into a separate service to prevent their data from flowing across borders. The government have expressed a hope that they will get a data adequacy agreement, but they have not fleshed out what that will be, whether we will
adopt the same standards, or whether our standards will diverge. That will contribute to a wider problem with Brexit, which is this uncertainty, where people don’t know what their legal status is. There’s a wide spectrum of issues, and it’s one of those things where the more we look into it, the more challenges that we’ve identified and, to be quite honest, that people didn’t know about. Our major objective is to try to flush those issues out, to try to make it as clear as possible what could happen to the industry, and do what we can to campaign against it. FEED: Through talking to people, what has been the general awareness level about the effects of different Brexit scenarios? GEORGE OSBORN: We found that there were essentially two tiers of how much people knew about what was going on. The major international game publishers were aware of what was going on and were planning for it. They were aware of many of the issues, and in many cases a lot of them were aware of particular problems. Not all of them though. We have had a few people at major publishers saying ‘thank you’ for our Brexit guide. But with smaller businesses, it was reminiscent of what happened with GDPR. With GDPR, there was this big dash at the beginning of last year. Around February or March time it came onto the radar of small businesses, and they went, “What’s GDPR? How do I become compliant?” I think for the most part that was how people were going to be dealing with Brexit. They were essentially waiting for the problem to emerge, and then whack it on the head. We’ve been trying to surface those issues as early as possible so people talk about it now. If businesses aren’t thinking about no deal now, there’s a real possibility that if we were to somehow crash out, they could be in real trouble.
GEORGE OSBORN: The one that people are most aware of is access to talent. UKIE published its State of Play report (ukie. org.uk/brexit), which surveyed the games industry to find out how many employees were EU Nationals – ie were not from the UK – and the research indicated that about a third of people working in the British video games industry are EU Nationals. What that means in the case of either a Brexit deal that limits free movement or a no deal situation, is that it could lead, for example, to companies having to deal with securing visas for all of their current employees. The visa process at the moment is costly, time consuming, and difficult to get through. Some of the costs associated include companies having to pay in excess of £500 every four years to be a visa sponsor. They then need to pay immigration lawyers. If they are hiring someone who’s from what is defined as “rest of the world”, they also have to pay things like an immigration health
PEOPLE POWER One of the things that Games4EU is campaigning for is a People’s Vote, now that we know the ramifications of leaving the EU
FEED: We know that Brexit will have massive ramifications in the
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