Page 1306 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 3 April 2019
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The Greens will extend the producer tax offset and the PDV offset—that is post, digital and visual effects—to video game developers. This will help to bring international investment in game development into Australia and to make sure there are jobs for the talented graduates that we are turning out. These successful programs are refundable tax offsets that are currently available to producers of Australian feature films and television but have never been made available to game developers. Lastly, we need to acknowledge that the true fortunes of this industry are tied to fast, reliable, universally accessible national broadband, something that Australia can hardly lay claim to having.
Notwithstanding some of these infrastructural and cultural problems, and in particular the gender issues I have mentioned, there is much to commend this motion. The Greens will be supporting it.
MR BARR (Kurrajong—Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Social Inclusion and Equality, Minister for Tourism and Special Events and Minister for Trade, Industry and Investment) (3.40): I am very pleased to speak in support of the motion put forward by Mr Pettersson this afternoon. It would be fair to observe that video games have come a long way since Pong was first played on the Atari in the 1970s or since a small yellow dot called Pac-Man began munching on little white pills whilst running away from ghosts, and since that little pixelated man called Mario began rescuing princesses from Donkey Kong in the early 1980s.
Leaps and bounds in computer processing, advanced graphic capabilities and of course the advent of the internet have completely changed the video game industry. I confess—and this will date me shockingly—SimCity and Civilization were the games of my era. Given the theme of those games, it is perhaps no surprise that I have ended up where I have.
Mr Hanson: Prefer Call of Duty?
MR BARR: I will leave that well alone. In 2018 global sales were projected to reach $A200 billion and revenue from the release of the most popular video games now is outstripping even the biggest of Hollywood’s blockbuster films. It used to be that a video game would be built on the back of a good movie—and I think of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, James Bond or Harry Potter—but today it seems like a movie, maybe of questionable quality, is more likely to be built on the back of a successful video game. The Resident Evil franchise, for example, has grossed more than $1 billion at the worldwide box office. Indeed, some reports show video game revenue surpassing the film industry global box office and streaming services.
Gone are the days when a video game was, as Ms Le Couteur described, a somewhat socially awkward, single young male playing against a computer. Today the most successful games are massive multiplayer online games played by millions of people around the world simultaneously—real people playing against each other, cooperating with each other and forming online communities. The number of gamers globally is expected to grow to 2.7 billion by 2021; so it is clear that video games are now very big business and they are also becoming a very big sport.
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