Game Showdown 2014 Witness Massive Response
Anibrain School of Media Design’s The Game Showdown 2014 ended on 22 November, with a great line-up of eminent speakers from the industry coming down to the venue to encourage kids and professionals alike and give them the correct guidance and insights as to how to enter the industry.
The event started with a video about how the video games have evolved over the years and how the advanced technology has enabled us to make the video games that are almost life-like in today’s day and age.
Syed Abbas, Head of Production at Ubisoft’s Pune Studio – having over a decade of experience in game production and currently heading the studio – started off the proceedings with a lot of impetus on the future’s game developers and artists. Ubisoft Pune boasts of being one of the first studios in India to produce PS3 games, will be the first one to produce PS4 games as well.
Venkat Chandar, Co-founder and Indie Developer at Axiom Studios, was one of the speakers who had come to the Showdown to talk about the Indie scene in the country. With rise of the mobile phone industry and smartphones taking the Indian market by storm, casual gaming is one of the biggest game markets the Indie developers could start with. “When starting your own game be your biggest critic. Be your game’s marketing guy and spread the word across all the forums and communities and ask other indie developers to try the game and give feedback. Maintain a developer’s diary and keep an update on the daily development you do while the game is in the development. Be able to fund your own game and be independent in the aspect that you make a game that you want to play,” Venkat added.
Rajiv Indimath, Advisor at Catapooolt.com, a crowd funding website spoke about how crowd funding can enable the gaming industry and various challenges in the production could be overcome with the use of crowd funding instead of going for different revenue streams.
He shared a few figures which showed developing countries like India having a tremendous growth in the crowdfunding market. With over 200 gaming studios coming up in the last five years, gaming in India is certainly one of the emerging verticals within the M&E industry. He also mentioned that of these 200 studios, the Indies certainly found it very tough to fund their games and with focus on monetisation, developers tend to sometimes forget about the core, which is the game design.
To tackle all of these problems, Catapooolt is planning to start crowd funding exclusively for the game developers and see to it that these games come out in the market and provide a launchpad for a lot of these game studios.
Four of them together had a very similar take on how should one progress if one has to make deep inroads in the industry. One has to play a lot of games and know the current trends in the industry. Take ideas but not blatantly copy or try to imitate a game. Be original and put in a lot of crazy ideas before settling for one. And lastly, if your product does not have the quality, then no matter how well you market your game, it is not going to go the distance. Quality is the first guaranteed step towards success of a game. On this note the conference ended with the prize distribution taking place where the winners in the three categories were: Cool Dude Studios in the school category; Sceptre in the college category and Axiom Studios in the professional.
Anibrain School of Media Design’s The Game Showdown was one of the first of its kind online gaming competition and received tremendous response with a number of entries in the first year of the competition itself. Competitions like these create a lot of awareness about the gaming scene and how to develop games. Also, eminent industry professionals coming in support of such initiatives will help the kids identify their correct talent.