I Just Want To Make One Thing Perfectly Clear…

I received a phonecall from Tracy Cook on Monday and talked to her about a number of issues for the computer games industry in Western Australia. It was a pretty up-beat discussion with a few obvious issues discussed. Unfortunately, the tone of the article that was published does not match the tone of the interview. I don’t really understand where the negativity came from, so I wanted to make sure that the context around the discussion and my views is available.

First up, I see bringing Interzone to Perth as a tremendous success on all counts. There is no question about that; IZ has attracted an incredibly talented team that is working hard on a very cool game. It has helped put some momentum behind the game industry in Perth and we now have a growing game development community.

Challenges do exist in the path for us to nurture this fledgeling industry in Perth and one of those challenges is the dollar but WA has never competed purely on price in this market.  We don’t compete with China on that basis but we do compete on the quality of our people, the compatibility of our culture with the US & Europe and our unique geopolitical location. The main challenge that I see is to build up the infrastructure here so that we are able to compete with the world on the basis of the quality of our developers and their ability to regularly ship successful games; once that is the case, any fluctuations on the dollar simply don’t matter.

However, we’re not quite there yet and one of the most obvious questions I answered was indeed the issue of the US dollar; has the falling dollar had an impact on the cost of a US company such as Interzone that is developing games in Perth? Of course it has, the cost for every foreign company doing anything in Australia has increased. Is this a problem? Absolutely, it makes it much harder for all Australian industries to compete on price and the game industry is not outside the laws of economics.

Will I be asking for additional government assistance to deal with this issue? No.

Are there skills shortages in Perth in your area? Yes, as was expected when the studio was set up, there are not a lot of highly experienced game developers in Perth. Of course there aren’t, Interzone is the first triple-A MMO studio to set up here. We’re working to build our talent base here and have internal training in place. We are training up graduates as fast as we can but we obviously can’t hire too many of them because we only have a certain number of people that are skilled that can then do the training.

Is Interzone looking to move the studio overseas? No.

What other countries would be competing with Perth for game development opportunities? Canada is always an option, a very equivalent country in a lot of ways and you get the benefit of being a bit closer to the US. The US itself, with the way the currency is working, is becoming more and more attractive to new developers. Then there is Korea, China and all the developing nations are skilling up in this sector, there is a lot of different options from that perspective.

As a result of the declining US dollar, will new projects come to Perth? Before commencing any project of the size that Interzone is undertaking, there is a level of due dilligence that has to be done. Clearly, an important part of that is where the main development is going to be based. An international organisation like Interzone has a number of options on that front and the mix will be appropriate for the title that is greenlit.

What are the greatest challenges that the game industry faces in Perth at the moment? It is still a fledgling industry; Interzone came to town a little more than 12 months ago now and there remains a great deal of work to be done to build up the industry. As Chairman of the IGDA Perth Chapter, I’m working pretty hard to help develop the infrastructure that is needed to build upon the success we are having with Interzone, to help develop a sustainable and resilient industry here in Perth. These things take time but we appear to be making progress on a number of fronts so I’m very optimistic.

I’ll try to post more when I have a moment.