A question was recently raised in Parliament as to why the details of the benefit to the computer games sector was not available in the R&D tax relief statistics that are provided by HMRC . The reason for this is because the SIC code for software and related services is not granular enough to differentiate companies in this sector from, say, a business software developer.

There has been a lot of campaigning for increased tax breaks for the computer games industry this year - a simple first step is to press for some recognised standard measurements of the industry. As any statistician will tell you, if it can't be measured, it can't be deal with.