Games industry hopes to push right buttons

Jul 14, 2015

A glimmer of hope came last month when the Greens secured a Senate inquiry into the local game development industry. The purpose of this, according to Senator Scott Ludlam, is to showcase the aforementioned economic benefits to policymakers.

“Just looking at it from a purely hard-headed economic perspective, we are missing an extraordinary opportunity here”, Ludlam told The Australian.

“You look at the inhabitants of parliament — a lot of them don’t take the sector seriously and perhaps they never will. But that doesn’t mean we can wait around for them to disappear. We have to build the case and build the evidence base,” he said.

The Senate inquiry is due to report in April next year at which point, Ludlam says, it will put a raft of different proposals on the table.

“Some of those will end up on the books all being well,” he said.

Reviving the three-year $20 million Australian Interactive Game Fund (AIGF), closed by the Coalition just 12 months after its establishment, is expected to be a key talking point.

The AIGF was originally put into motion by former Labor arts minister Simon Crean in a bid to help the local industry get back on its feet after a spate of high-profile foreign-owned studio ­closures.

It took more than 10 years of lobbying by the Game Developers Association of Australia to ­secure the AIGF, but it came at a critical juncture for the struggling local industry.

The relatively small investment of $10 million produced a number of success stories from individual titles such as the multi-award winning narrative puzzle game Framed, to enabling companies such as Defiant Development, Tin Man Games, The Voxel Agents and Uppercut Games to expand.

Defiant Development founder Morgan Jaffit says the $550,000 grant it was awarded through the program enabled the company to create a stream of critical and commercial successes with the likes of Hand of Fate.

“It turned us from being a small group of contractors doing largely work-for-hire projects to a 15-person full-time studio creating our own IP with the ability to self-publish, distribute, market, and reap all the rewards of what we create, which has put us in the position of being a long-term business in the Australian games space,” Mr Jaffit says.

What makes the premature axing of the fund all the more surprising is that the AIGF was not a handout, but effectively a loan awarded to individual projects and studios that was to be paid back.

Mr Jaffit says the returns usually paid off tenfold.

The local games industry has already demonstrated that a little bit of government support can go a long way, even at a state level.

Victoria has become the gaming capital of Australia, boasting almost 50 per cent of the 200 commercial game development studios in the country, thanks to the funding program set up by the state government.

It ranges from enterprise programs that give studios a dollar-matched grant (capped at $150,000) to help set up the business to a $30,000 grant that ­assists with marketing and legal costs. Another growth engine proposal that’s likely to get a push at the inquiry is extending the 40 per cent producer tax rebate that saved the local film industry to the games sector.

The rebate played a critical role in making Canada the third largest games industry in the world in terms of employment in the field after Japan and the US.

Australia was once home to some of the biggest studios in the world but the good times were unlikely to last.

The unsustainable work for hire model of producing licensed games and ports for overseas publishers left the industry susceptible to the vagaries of global market conditions and a high Australian dollar.

The collapse led to the local talent gravitating towards mobile games with stellar results.

But the market has now become brutally competitive, with over 50,000 mobile games released on iOS every year. Standing out from the crowd is only going to get harder.

With more Australian-owned games IP created in the last five years than any other time in the history of game development in Australia, the industry is hoping that the planned inquiry leads to tangible policy measures that allow our studios to remain competitive for years to come.

Source: The Australian