The European Commission Is Co-Funding A Lot Of Unannounced Games (And The Witcher 3)

Australia’s support for video game development has wavered greatly over the last few years, but the European Commission has a vastly different attitude.

The EC’s Creative Europe program has recently announced a list of 31 grants for video game developers, with the amounts, developers, projects and the percentage of which the project is being co-funded by the European Union.

There are some intriguing projects in there. Revolution Software, for instance, are best known for their work on the Broken Sword point-and-click adventure series and the remaster of Beneath A Steel Sky.

They’re also working on a game called The Enemy Within. What’s it about? We don’t know yet, because Revolution hasn’t announced anything, but we know it exists because the EU has given the British developers €150,000 in funding.

They’re not the only name to jump out of the box. Chinese Room are in the headlines recently for Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, but they have just received €124,503 for their next project, Total Dark.

CD Projekt RED are getting in on the act too: they might not be short of cash after the success of The Witcher 3, but the first paid-for expansion, Blood and Wine, is getting a €150,000 grant all the same.

Other names pop out of the list too, such as “Project Dallas”. It’s obviously a working title from Paradox, although nobody knows what it is yet (although that hasn’t stopped fans from prodding the grand strategy publisher on Reddit and their forums).

Either way, it’s good to see more support for the development of video games. It’d be nice to see more of that happen here — hopefully the upper house inquiry into local development will encourage a move in the right direction.