IESA April Newsletter

Below is a copy of our monthly newsletter for April

Welcome

Interactive Entertainment South Africa is a Non-Profit Company mandated to grow and develop the South African video game, serious game and virtual reality industries. We do apologies for taking so long to send this newsletter out, but as you will see it has been a very busy three months!

This Newsletter is just to keep you updated on what we've been up to!

Meeting with Nintendo of America
In March we met with Kirk Scott, who is the head of “Indie” relations at Nintendo of America. He is quite excited to work with us and get more South African games onto Nintendo platforms. Kirk met with some of our developers at GDC and will hopefully be coming out to EGE or rAge Johannesburg. We have now started the process to have South Africa as possible region that can be sent developer kits.

Meeting with Riot Games
In March we met with Zach Nass who works in Riot Games' international strategy department. Nick Hall, along with a couple developers, will be having dinner with them when they come visit Cape Town, and while it's still early in their due diligence process, We are hoping this means good news for our industry.

EGE Stand booked
We have booked a 36m2 stand at EGE. We would like to try and do something different with the stand this year as it very few of our members are that interested as using these sorts of expo to sell games or its services. We will use the majority of the stand to advertise what the local industry is about, how people can get into the industry, the different sectors within industry, schools etc. The remaining part of the stand would follow our "traditional approach", i.e. a curated sample of locally developed games. A number of “stands” in this section will be ear marked exclusively for games coming from the community, and the remainder will be given to IESA members.

Comments on the Films and Publications Board Amendment Act
We are currently drafting comments on the Films and Publications Board Amendment Act. We hope that we will be able to make verbal submissions as well. In addition, we are making a recording that highlights the most important changes and drafting “template” submissions for the broader public to use. Hopefully these steps will allow us to generate a lot of grass roots support to make changes or prevent some of the most egregious changes from happening.

Attending the World Intellectual Property Day Debate
Nick Hall attended a 5-a-side debate between Government and Industry on World Intellectual Property Day (26 April 2016). Nick represented IESA and Animation South Africa. He used the platform to argue for better sector support and reforms to our intellectual property laws to better serve and protect our industries

Gamescom 2016 National Pavilion
We are preparing our submission for a trade mission to Gamescom 2016 . If you are interested in attending the Gamescom trade mission, please go to our website and download the forms and send a digital copy to me as soon as possible.

Trade Mission to Paris Games Week
Following the success of the Masterclass Workshop we held in conjunction with the French Embassy and Le Game we are organizing a trade mission Paris Games Week in November.

Industry Survey
We will be continuing the industry surveys that I had been running under Make Games South Africa. The survey will be running during the month of May.

We have many more exciting developments in the works and we can't wait to let you know about them!

Nick Hall
Interactive Entertainment South Africa

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