Carte Blanche TV - local game developers making fortunes...
I see this is already on twitter feeds.
In case you missed it, watch mnet this Sunday 7pm for some good news.
http://carteblanche.dstv.com/player/894044
[edit] - updated heading to better represent video healines
In case you missed it, watch mnet this Sunday 7pm for some good news.
http://carteblanche.dstv.com/player/894044
[edit] - updated heading to better represent video healines
Comments
Is this going to be one of those articles guaranteed to cause an influx of soon-to-be-very-disappointed devs when they realise the reality is not that of a gold rush?
@LexAquilli and @FanieG I must be living under the Somerset West rock, but what does PVR and FPB in this context stand for and about?
Also, I believe that there will be some form of online video on Monday! But just in case if you could hold on those PVR recordings until that surfaces ;)
So the game and studios featured was Broforce - Free Lives and Desktop Dungeons - QCF design, as well as Cadence.
Then Nick also talked about not having enough new game developer talent, for the demand to fill companies.
I was really impressed with Evan's comments for the Free Lives interview, and your house studio looks awesome!
- Not as bad as I had feared
- Seems awfully white-male-dominated on the surface - probably mostly a true reflection
- "Love them, or hate them because your kids can't stop playing them" ... blergh
- No discussion about the market itself - who's playing, what/where are they playing
- The heck was with the repeated attempts to connect "games" with "night club"?
Couldn't help but think "reskin characters" sounded scary :D
So I think although the show had some problems that are oblivious to us who are engaged in the industry, it did a good job at letting the general population know about the industry and inspiring kids to give this a go.
Also that drawing board was hilarious. Typical Free Lives.
Night clubs are totally hip fun places that hip young people can relate to, not dumb boring nerd things for dumb boring nerds. :P
Although I can't really imagine a way for the aspirations of a bunch of 30-ish year old geeks to be made relatable to what I presume is a primarily 50+ year old audience in 8 minutes. I understood that the angle of the piece was success in the industry as a whole from the beginning (that's what was said when Carte Blanche contacted us).
A really nice bunch of people though. Lovely to work with. There was quite a struggle to do the piece at all. The non-hard-hitting feel-goodness of the piece is something of a departure for them (which hopefully benefited game development in South Africa... I guess we'll see)
So there are many aspects to making a game, from art to music to programming. However if your son wants to get into games right now learning some programming skills will be eminently useful. Scratch is a great platform for teaching the logic of coding to a young learner. If you have access to an Ipad I'd recommend Tynker (I'm using it on my 9 year old nephew). If he's into Minecraft there are some good learning programs based around that. Lego has a great (albeit really expensive) series of programmable robots called Mindstorm.
Any of these would be good places to start. If he devours it he'll naturally upgrade to "real" programming languages and tools when he hits the barrier of what Scratch/Tynker can do. But right now it's just about getting the bug to bite ;) All that being said, board games/card games/paper drawings/role playing are a super viable way to get into game design that requires zero programming and makes great use of latent art skills. It'll be easier for you to get involved as well. ;)
1. Attend any MGSA (or, judging by the people I'd see at the Microsoft meetups which include many other technology-oriented special interest groups) meetup, both in CT and Joburg, and you'll find that by far the vast majority of the members are white and male. So the answer to "have you seen our faces" is pretty much a yes, with a sample size that's larger than the number of people who post here regularly. But never mind that, we're talking about the Carte Blanche video: how many women and non-white people were in the segment?
2. What's wrong with attracting more women and people of different races anyway? There don't have to be "no women and different ethnicities on this site" to want to encourage more women and different ethnicities, do there?
What I have personally seen is that most of the non-white gamers are more common on consoles than on PC's and woman mostly introduced into gaming because of a boyfriend.
I personally don't feel that effort needs to be wasted in order to attract a specific gender or race but instead focus on attracting existing game developers to this website and introducing more people that have an interest to it.
(give me a sec to don my flame-retardant suit)
However does every thread have to become about that? Can we not just recognize that the (short, hastily put together) insert on Carte Blanche on Sunday did a good job of explicitly highlighting that ours is a growth industry, worth investing in and studying for and leave it at that? The focus was obviously on some wildly successful recent local games, not an in-depth expose on the full current state of the current industry (that would certainly be nice to see at some point).
Basically all I am saying is that I feel it is more productive to try and get those already game developers exposed to MGSA than to try and teach new people into it. Although I do agree that some sense of teaching and exposure to those that aren't involved in Game Development should be done.
Struggling to explain my message properly but basically I feel that there are quite a lot of people out there doing Game Dev in their spare time that does not have any idea that something like MGSA exists.
I've personally had a lot of people tell me they were put off by the segment showing white men with loads of money. And while a few people is hardly representative of the audience opinion at large, it's worth considering that that is a reaction people have had.
I actually spoke about representation in the industry and the legacy problems that MGSA has to deal with in my interview. Sadly that footage didn't make it into the final cut. The point of the piece was always about raising awareness of the MGSA (at least from my perspective for being involved) and I'm always keen to hear ideas of how we could do that in more representative ways. Because representation, being seen to not be alone, matters.
The timing of the interviews was a problem, EGE made it impossible for the Carte Blanche crew to come to QCF's offices, which meant that our team didn't get camera time. I know that would have helped, seeing as QCF is 40% women.
The profitability angle is probably also the only lens that people are going to use to evaluate game development in local mainstream media for quite some time. We won't get more in-depth coverage for ages yet, because the people directing that coverage care about how much money gets made as a massive legitimising factor. This isn't to say that this coverage is bad, it's just up to us here in the MGSA to try to make the resulting coverage also be fair and helpful.
Yes, it's rad that MGSA got coverage like this to put it in front of people that had never seen/thought about game development careers before. We can still try to do better, mostly because if we don't, the people covering us won't either - at least not from a positive angle...
P.S. I don't think it's fair to call the Carte Blanche segment hastily produced. This was shot in May during EGE, after at least a month of back and forth emails and questions. Yes, it was short, but that doesn't mean it was poorly cut. The issues people are finding with the content are perception issues that our industry has as a whole.
edit K, checked my email records: First contact on 28th May. Shooting happened during EGE. I did get a list of pre-questions, it certainly wasn't as haphazardly organised as other TV interviews I've had. I had the contact times confused with all the other press contacts happening around the DD mobile launch.
There certainly are more diverse people on the forums than what was seen to represent us on TV (I say this fully aware that my white, male, privileged ass was one of the visible ones), that's what @dammit is trying to point out. You're on the same side here.
1) That wasn't the expectation set
2) There just wasn't enough time
If Devs where actually at EGE I tried to get the CB guys to interview them as well, but a lot of the stuff got cut and some of the interviews didn't make it to the final spot at all.
The intent of this topic was just to share the exciting news that there is some coverage on local game development. The only reason I knew about the interviews, was because we had a stand at EGE. Carte Blanche also interviews us, but also cut that interview - not sure why, but probably because we did not fit the story of making fortunes yet well.
Yesterday we did a talk, well Pieter, at a local school in Somerset West and I can tell you there was not one white person and it was a very good area. Which is great, the demographic will change, and probably sooner than we think.
I should probably not do this, but check these times on the video above:
0:00 / 2:39 / 3:14 / 6:40 / 6:44
These few seconds we miss, but maybe the people whom where at EGE didn't, and also we have had people talk to us very excited since now the fortunes brings new interest to our industry.
I wish you all good positive thoughts, and maybe decide for yourself how you can be the change you seek.
Lets go an have fun making games!
Congrats again for the people and games on the episode,
and remember next time. Go to expos if you want to be seen.