I had the good fortune of attending the first of hopefully a full series of Gaming P2P’s at the Accelerator Centre last Tuesday! The P2P was started by Andrew Matlock of the Industry Corporation, a local gaming startup with a game (Partyboat) out on the Xbox Live Indie Marketplace.
I arrived a few minutes early to find there were already some people in the room talking it up, including the organizers, some industry guests and speakers, as well as a few fresh faces. It’s never a bad sign to see some keeners ready to learn and connect!
The P2P got off to a start with some announcements about Communitech and how P2P‘s work from Iain Klugman, local funnyman/hero. We then went around the room and introduced ourselves, titles, and a bit about what we do. It was great to see so many new people in the local gaming community, some that I’ve only heard of online through mass Googling and Linked In hunting! I could see eyes darting around as each name and position was called, people were wondering if the next person be a potential team mate or partner. I was probably the most guilty of this being that I’m hunting for local 3D game programmers! After the intros we had an idea of the wide range of people in the room and the reasons why they were there. We had indies, startups, establisheds, researchers, services, governments, npos, AAA’s and all!
Andrew had a number of speakers lined up and we started with Kim Gibson of the OMDC. She talked about the government funding available through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s programs which included the OMDC Fund and Tax Credit. She couldn’t go into too much detail about it all as it was fairly complicated or not in her area, but we were made aware that there is some good funding available for video game companies in Ontario. In addition to the 2 sources above, there were a few other digital media funds available on their website that you could get funding with. While it was exciting to hear about the money, she also let us know that it’s quite the over-subscribed fund and only about 25% of the applications get funded per year. When quizzed about how easy or hard it would be for the startups in the room to get any money from the fund, she let us know that we had to already have a product out there making revenue or at least have someone with several years of industry experience on our team. It was kind of disappointing to hear that as I imagine most people in the room didn’t meet those criteria, but she did say they saved some money for early stage operations. Since it’s a government fund, it’s all about creating jobs and prosperity for the province, and so for this fund they are really aiming at spinoffs and established companies I believe. Mike Schmalz of Digital Extremes later told us about how those programs have really helped their company and it pays for a good chunk of their employee’s salaries. Kim did mention some info sessions were coming up in July and August for those who wanted to learn more. I can’t wait until I can get access to those resources!
I might not fully remember what order people spoke in, so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but my friend said that Deloitte was next.
Next up was Matt Flood from Deloitte talking about the different funding programs including the OMDC options mentioned earlier, SR&ED and IRAP, as well as a few others. He was nice enough to bring in copies of his presentation for everyone so we wouldn’t have to scribble down notes frantically. It was definitely beneficial to hear about how many programs were out there and I’m sure some of the people in the room were unawares as to how great SR&ED can be for them. Luckily Matt spelled it out for us so we could understand how easy some of the criteria are to meet!
Next up was Mike Schmalz of Digital Extremes, a AAA studio in London Ontario. He walked in late and I thought he looked familiar, but I couldn’t figure out who he was. He was casually dressed in a tshirt and jeans and I would have had no idea he was the President of a game studio (although in retrospect perhaps it makes more sense!). Mike shared a bit about the story of his company, the industry, and what he thinks the future of some different technologies will be. He had some amazing insights and was a very down to earth guy that was genuinely happy to have real discussions with all the people in the room. You could tell he was a guy who likes what he does and wants to help other local game people. I definitely learned a few things about the industry and game design itself that I never really knew, like how little the game studio makes on retail games, compared to the publishers. It sounded almost like the music industry in how the artist usually got very little of the final CD sale, and Mike mentioned that one of his games was a great success selling a large number of copies, yet they still made a loss on it, which is kind of mind blowing! A great little insight that he pointed out was if we ever see a game on sale for $39.99, then the game studio is making no money off of it.
Mike spoke of how piracy hurts the industry and how it’s killing the PC gaming market (which makes me a sad panda) and that console gaming is the best way to protect your game from theft. He mentioned a really interesting thought that most games now have a multiplayer feature in it, and it’s not so much even about the game play or fun, but as a mechanism to make people hold on to their games for longer before reselling them, to reduce the 2nd hand market, which they get no income from.
I think if Andrew didn’t eventually introduce the next speaker, people would have kept asking Mike questions forever! There were a lot of knowledge hungry people in there, and the conversations felt like a true round table experience where everybody wanted to share with everyone else. I guess that makes a good P2P right? I don’t remember the last time I got that feeling so strongly in such a large group!
Last, but not least, was Andy Smith from EA. For those of you who heard EA was in town but had no idea where, they actually bought out a local gaming startup called J2Play, so that explains that! Andy went over a bit of the history of what J2Play did in the social gaming scene and how EA failed and was looking for someone to make a solution for them. It ended up in EA taking over, however they also bought Playfish a short while after and put them in a tough place. Andy talked about social gaming and the scourges (my words, not his) that are upon us like Farmville (I don’t even want to link to it), and other disposable Facebook games (if you can call them that!). He had a lot of great insight into how those games worked, how long their audience lasted, turn over being the highest of any game, some in mere days, and he also talked about the iPhone games marketplace. The key message was that if you don’t get into the top 25 game lists, then it’s pointless to make an iPhone game from a profitability point of view as no one will ever find you on their poorly organized marketplace; you can’t find the good games from the bad. He mentioned how companies like EA have strategies to stay in the top 25, such as when they drop out they reduce the cost of the game and do a bit of marketing to push sales enough that it pops back up there, or if they can’t get back in they just drop it like it’s over.
I believe after this we ran out of time for the group discussion and Andrew quickly concluded the P2P and encouraged us to stick around and connect. I ended up staying for another 30 minutes at least, until a hungry girlfriend called to ask me why I said it would be over at 6pm when it was 6:45 and I was still there. Another sign of a good P2P I guess, it just keeps going and the benefits never end! I was lucky enough to get some time to talk to Mike Schmalz in person for quite some time and got a lot of great insight into what Digital Extremes is up to, how the industry works, and to learn about the origins of the UNREAL brand. I was pretty excited to get to talk to a guy who was part of bringing to life my first and favourite FPS experience: Unreal Tournament! In fact the fast paced action of that game is probably the biggest inspiration for the first game I’m developing in my startup now!
I also got to learn about the game engine, Evolution, that Digital Extremes was working on and how they are trying to help out local game companies by letting them use it on some very easy terms. I’m definitely gonna follow up and find out if the engine makes sense for what I’m doing!
It was also great to meet Jodi Simpson of Tech Alliance in London. I realized later that I was indeed already following them on Twitter and they seem like a Communitech of sorts for the London area. I learned about a cool new incubator they are working on where you can drop in some IP you don’t have time to work on anymore so others can license it and you can collect the royalties! Sounds like a good deal to me!
All in all I would have to say that that was definitely a wicked event and I got a lot of great value and connections out of it. It was great to reconnect with some old faces and meet some new ones as well, and not only local but from nearby AAA studios! If you are into the video game development scene in the Waterloo Region, I would definitely encourage you to come out to the next one and to become a part this great group!