By Lawrence Casiraya
INQUIRER.net
LOCAL game developers are looking to ride the outsourcing wave and likewise get juicier contracts from overseas.
The global gaming industry is predicted to become a $30-billion market by 2010, according to Gabby Dizon, president of the Game Developers Association of the Philippines.
As an industry, gaming has evolved into several sub-sectors and closely related to animation and graphics design.
The main industry, though, remains the development of games (for gaming consoles or for the Internet) although the same principles apply to e-learning and even corporate training services.
“There is a lot of business to be made. Advergaming (or advertising inside games) has been getting bigger and bigger,” Dizon said during a briefing.
Next month’s e-Services conference marks the first participation of gaming as an industry, alongside other segments within BPO (business process outsourcing) such as call centers, software development and medical transcription.
The local game industry is smaller compared to these other segments. According to Dizon, also president of Flipside Games, local game development companies employ only about 300 workers.
“We are what can be considered as a start-up industry. But we are slowly growing and we hope to attract more foreign game publishers to locate here in the country,” he said.
He also cited the popularity of online gaming locally as something that encourages software developers to work in the gaming industry.
May 16th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
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March 22nd, 2008 at 10:40 am
Like everything, game development is one of those things that is attractive to outsource to the Philippines. Recently in the town I come from (Brisbane), we have had one of our major game developers go bust (Auran), mainly because they spent way too much money on developing their games locally. Another mistake they made is they decided to write their own gaming engine, which I think is suicide when you don’t have a big market for much else. Outsourcing and using third party products to build your own is key to making money and not blowing it.
March 10th, 2008 at 11:14 am
Yes I can see the future in gaming and its Filipino made! hehehe
March 10th, 2008 at 9:52 am
your right men ^-^
January 31st, 2008 at 12:28 pm
@quickslash
“when you talk about gaming you dont need to talk about bussiness in order to make a good one you must have passion in order to make”
Yeah but when you want to SURVIVE with your game, you have to think of business. Lots of start ups have experienced problems or even died because of that thinking. They’ll go “Hey let’s make a game/comic because we like games/comics and a lot of people like games/comics and we know people who can make them!”. But later on they collapse when real life business issues hit them in the face such as publications, salary, funding, piracy, management, rent, dti, sec, etc etc. If they have thought of these in “step 1″ as you said, they would’ve been prepared.
And going back to what you said, you could probably make a good game without thinking of business. But without a solid business plan, people would probably never know how good your game is. Unless of course you plan to give for free and you’re rich enough to make a game without expecting any revenue in return. Like, you just made a game for your own silly pride.
It was said in the past GDC i think: “You don’t become a game developer to become an entrepreneur. You become an entrepreneur to become an entrepreneur”.