Filipino game developers eye $30-B global market

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.