Australia needs to start taking game developers seriously, or risk getting left behind
Australia’s gaming talent is heading overseas to find work, all because our businesses are not realising the potential these developers have at their fingertips, writes The Pulse’s Phil Sullivan.
Believe it or not, video gaming is vital to the future of marketing.
This isn’t another piece on the virtues of ‘gamification’, and I’m not going to tell you about adopting a gaming theory for your business; both have been done to death.
Instead, I’ll put it simply. Australian business is losing out on the most significant talent pool of this generation, a group of people developing the technology that is crucial for the future of how businesses communicate across the world.
There are plenty of (indie) game developers in Australia, but not many AR and VR developers. Why? Because AR and VR titles are still generally tech demos at best, exceptionally niche nausea-inducing interests at worst.
A lot of game developers are starting to avoid VR development after the hype has slowed and the sales of VR titles have stagnated. AR can be defined very broadly but generally (outside of perhaps Pokemon Go / Ingress) hasn’t really taken off in the gaming space either.
Meanwhile, most large publishers / developers no longer have game development arms in Australia because development costs are much higher here than locations such as China. Internationally-backed game studios were here – when there was no significant government funding but a low $AU – but they’ve generally exited now.
So the calls for government funding into such areas always strike me as a request to prop up an industry that wouldn’t be able to support itself without them and have a high likelihood of failure.