The great and good from the games industry – Ian Livingstone from Eidos, Chris Deering from Codemasters, David Braben of Elite fame – gathered in Whitehall, London, today for the Westminster eForum, to discuss what the games industry wants the government to include in its pre-budget report next week.

And while some MPs turned up – including former defence minister Tom Watson, and shadow minister for the creative industries Ed Vaizey – the star turn was a no-show. Keith Vaz MP, widely known for his anti-gaming views, had to be unavoidably elsewhere. Reporters looking for an attention-grabbing headline and a bit of Vaz-bashing (or not, depending on what he said) were disappointed.

The games industry is undoubtedly important to the UK economy, and several speakers at the eForum said it was bigger than the film industry. The problem is that it is in relative decline. Indeed, it looks as though the UK – currently the world's third-largest producer of computer and video games – will be overtaken by Canada and France, both of which provide tax breaks to games developers. It could sink to sixth.

TIGA, the independent game developers' association, has been asking for similar tax credits to be offered in the UK. Our developers can compete with the best in the world when the playing field is fair, claimed TIGA chief executive Richard Wilson, but it isn't fair. "The creative industries need the chance to flourish and grow," he said. "A tax break against production costs could create an extra 3,500 jobs, and generate an additional £400m for the Treasury over five years."

Wilson pointed out that the film industry in the UK gets £100m a year in tax credits.

There are also two other areas where the games industry wants government to act. First, there are problems with the higher education system. Second, the UK is falling behind in terms of broadband provision, and online gaming is today's growth area.

Elite developer David Braben, founder of Frontier Developments, complained that "we are getting far fewer people with computer science skills: we're having to recruit people from abroad". He blamed this partly on ICT being a dull subject in schools, leading to a decline in applications for computer science degrees. "Games courses that are just studies of games are no use to us," he said.

Ian Livingstone said "the problem with universities is that they're paid on a bums-on-seats basis", which led to a "dumbing down". There should be incentives to promote the study of "hard" topics such as maths and computer science.

Keith Ramsdale, Electronic Arts' vice president for Northern Europe, said "the UK punches above its weight in Europe", but we needed action on taxes and skills to keep the UK attractive as a place for development. He pointed out that the movie industry had a unified voice in the government-backed UK Film Council, which also got lottery funding. Again, there wasn't a level playing field.

Ramsdale said that, on an optimistic prediction, the online games business could be close to the packaged games business in revenues this year, and that broadband speeds were important. "Getting 2Mbps by 2012 is not quite ambitious enough," he said. "The broadband pipe needs to be a whole lot thicker and faster."

Vaizey, who quipped that "every MP needs a Wii", said the focus of the next government would be reducing the deficit – "if we're lucky enough to be elected" – so tax breaks would not be easy to introduce. He also wondered if the UK Film Council could "extend its remit" to include games, though "to be frank with you, I don't know whether that would work".

A member of the audience pointed out that it had taken years to get games ratings out of the hands of a film body (the BBFC) that "doesn't understand games at all". Livingstone replied that in terms of moving images they were similar, so "it has to be looked at, even if it doesn't work out."

You could, of course, say the same about the rest of the debate. Everybody recognises that the UK games industry is not doing as well as it could be, and isn't the publishing powerhouse it used to be; that the universities are not producing enough computer scientists; that slow broadband could limit the development of online gaming.

The government will recognise that all these things have to be looked at, but there seems to be relatively little chance of them coming up with something that works out.