European games industry has been decimated - Jobling

Eutechnyx's Darren Jobling has expressed concern that European development teams could suffer in the future as the games industry becomes increasingly dominated by North America.

He believes that as European publishers have thinned out to a handful, development studios could suffer the same fate as they are snapped up by bigger corporations.

"The games industry is currently a US dominated industry, everything we had left in Europe has pretty much been decimated," said Jobling, speaking exclusively to GamesIndustry.biz

"I was talking about it on the publishing side, obviously there's only Ubisoft and Eidos of any size and I think that's pretty much it.

"What concerns me, is that if you look at publishing what happened was Infogrames came in buying up Ocean, buying up Gremlin, and the whole thing collapsed, and that just worries me about these people coming in buying developers."

Jobling is especially worried about movie companies coming in to buy developers, believing that history will repeat itself when the "new ownership" discovers what a tough business they are in.

"They'll come in and buy somebody, it won't work out and the whole thing will just collapse," he said.

"I wouldn't want what happened to European publishing happen to European development."

Eutechnyx recently announced plans to open a US studio in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania later this year.

The full interview with Eutechnyx's Darren Jobling and Todd Eckert is now online.