Does it matter that Britain's highly creative computer games industry is being taken over by overseas corporations?
Microsoft's confirmation that it is buying Rare - maker of Donkey Kong Country among others - doesn't matter by itself. Indeed, it may be good for Rare, which had been experiencing a deteriorating relationship with its previous part-owner, Nintendo of Japan.
Now it will make games exclusively for Microsoft's Xbox console. But Rare is only the latest computer games company to have been swallowed up by French, Japanese and American companies as the games industry inexorably follows motor manufacturing, and a long list of other industries others into foreign ownership.
It is easy to say that this is just part of globalisation, from which everyone benefits - except for one thing. This is strictly one-way traffic. British video games companies haven't been buying up foreign companies on anything like the scale that foreign companies have been buying UK companies.
This matters for two reasons. The first is the nurturing of the UK's domestic talent. A few weeks ago Lord Puttnam criticised the "creative deficit" in television programmes that made us so dependent on US imports rather than home-grown talent.
That is not a problem in the games industry, We have an abundance of talent as kids who cut their programming teeth on the Sinclair Spectrum and BBC computers in the 1980s blossomed to become the computer games success stories of the 1990s.
At one stage Eidos, publisher of the Lara Croft series, was the fastest growing company of any kind in the world with a market capitalisation of £1bn. Now it is worth only a fraction of that and is regularly tipped as the next takeover candidate.
If Britain wants to protect and nourish this talent then it should make sure that it doesn't lose control of where the industry is going.
The second reason it matters is that it is yet another example of the City's inability to fund creative industries, especially cyclical ones, that don't conform to its own myopic paradigms. If we are not careful, the computer games industry will go the way of the film industry.
We have a rich reservoir of actors, writers, directors and technicians yet the overwhelming proportion of new films, including those with a UK content are financed from America. This matters because, worldwide, the computer games industry is worth more than the film industry and has greater growth potential.
If we are not careful something similar will happen to the emerging mobile games industry, which will have a much bigger potential customer base than the video games industry since practically everyone in the industrialised world has a mobile phone.
Creative initiative is already being stifled by the telephone companies' shortsighted attempts to snatch most of the revenue that mobile games will generate. This is the opposite of what should be done.
They should be giving the vast majority of the premium rate income generated by games companies to the people who develop them. Otherwise they won't do it.
They realised this early on in Japan, where content providers get 80% of the cost of the telephone calls made to access their products. This is as it should be. If they can't get a return on their extremely risky investment, mobile games companies won't have the resources to continue.
When the telecommunications companies eventually realise that they have been killing the golden geese, they will start outbidding each other to secure the services of the best content providers. They haven't got long to change their minds.
Today Nokia launched its first third generation (3G) phone. If people are going to pay the high prices demanded for these devices they will want serious new games and not just recycled ones from the video games industry.
Unless the balance of power swings quickly to the content providers Britain will not even have the luxury of a mobile games industry vulnerable to foreign takeover because it won't be there in the first place.
· Victor Keegan is editor of Guardian Online
