UK Games Industry Over the Hill?

Tinkle writes "A games industry campaign group has warned the UK is falling behind on coding skills because university courses are not up to scratch. But this article includes an interview with an industry coding veteran who believes a lack of creative home computing hardware (think: Atari ST) is more likely to be at the root of the skills shortage, and explains why Britain's games coders are getting a bit long-in-the-tooth."

Comments

It's not a university problem, it's people leaving

[cliffski]

It's a staff retention issue. I blogged in some depth about it here:

http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/?p=16

basically people run games companies on the system of getting cheap graduates, treating them badly, and then replenishing them the minute they wise up and leave. This isn't a new thing at all.
Of my msn contacts from when I was in retail AAA dev, 70% of my ex colleagues now work in other industries or for themselves. That's the problem.