Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Where does Newfoundland fit in with the Canadian Video Game Industry?

I just wanted to re-post a few stories being carried on the CBC. I'm not in the Newfoundland video game industry but I'd like to know how we relate to the issues touched upon in these articles.

Respawned: How video games revitalize cities.

Video game subsidy battle heats up.

In my last post on the local game industry I had asked in my reader responses "I wonder what the barrier to entry was that prevented the industry from flourishing like this before? Has the costs of development dropped enough? Did some government program silently encourage its growth". I haven't heard much in answer to these questions but I'd like to read any opinions/answers in the comment section below.
A few more questions I'd like to add; Do you see Newfoundland as being competitive given the benefits available elsewhere in Canada? Being a smaller province do development studios put down 'roots' into our communities faster here? What spin-offs have we already seen from our own games industry?

1 comment:

RoddieKieley said...

In general the barrier to entry has been lowered via new pathways into the industry such as mobile, online, and the 'online' stores of the consoles such as XBox Live, WiiWare and PSN. Of course these take their place next to the area of PC development which has historically had a much lower barrier to entry than the console space.

In particular our government has been looking toward growing a video game development sector for a number of years but until recently, with Other Ocean Interactive, had not succeeded in bringing a medium to large scale development studio here. In fact the industry was listed as a focus industry on nlbusiness.ca for a period of time.

Competitiveness breaks down into talent and the business environment. Certainly there is talent here, if not to the level of the large centre's such as Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, but I think that is to be expected. The business environment is a larger question given how seriously the other provinces have gone after the industry to locate in their respective districts.

Along the theme of focusing on your core unique strengths it seems to me the government has chosen to focus more seriously on things like Ocean Technology where I think many people would expect us to develop an edge given our connection to the sea.