The Australian Videogame Industry

Original Post: October 19 2011

The Australian videogame industry is suffering right now, in a bad way. Though the small, more agile teams and the two juggernauts of iOS games Halfbrick and Firemint are going gangbusters, the larger-scale, higher budget sector has been all but obliterated over the past four or five years. Following this, there is a perceived 'brain drain' (how often we hear that with regard to the Australian workforce...) or an 'exodus' of talent moving overseas, particularly to Canada. Why are the pastures so much greener in the snow-covered gardens of our northern Commonwealth brothers? What has happened to the local industry to cause such a drought? How can we pick up the pieces and carry on?

I've been talking to a lot of people about this, and I have some thoughts. 

Firstly, I think its important to recognise that we have the talent here in Australia. There are dozens of designers, programmers, artists etc who have worked in the A-grade industry environment for a number of years, and a whole lot of them are out of work. We have even more graduates of an increasing number of videogame related tertiary qualifications from both private and public universities or colleges. Local talent is not a problem. If (and when) we do lose some overseas, we are very well-placed to produce more.

Further, our talent is being nurtured by this new wave of videogame degrees. I am responsible for one of them! Increasingly, the academy is working on enhancing the education these graduates receive. Rather than simply a programming degree working in UDK one semester, we are incorporating the critical artistic skills that differentiate an Arts/Humanities graduate from a TAFE tradesman. Our talent will have more going for them than the ability to follow instructions and program what their creative leads tell them to. Our talent will be the creative leads. They won't just know how to create videogames, but why it's worth doing so.

The international developers know some of this. According to Anthony Redden, formerly of THQ Studio Australia, after the exposure the closure of his studio received in the media, international recruiters were contacting him with job opportunities. These overseas studios actually want the kind of talent we have here in Australia. Further, some of the talent is obviously willing to move, internationally, to wherever the work is. To me, that means there is an opportunity to import talent if we need to--Canada is doing it, why shouldn't Australia?

The question becomes how do we manage to keep the work here in Australia. To understand this problem it's worth taking a moment to note where the work came from in the first place, to know why it all dried up so suddenly. Several of studios that have closed recently: Blue Tongue and THQ Studio Australia, Pandemic and Visceral Games, Team Bondi, Krome and now KMM, relied significantly on foreign investment. Blue Tongue and THQ Australia were subsidiaries of THQ, Pandemic and Visceral Games both belonged to EA, and Team Bondi, well... they worked with Rockstar and fell apart for their own special reasons. The executives at Team Bondi were former Team Soho Studio employees, so foreign in a different way.

The relationship a lot of Australian game development work had to the publishers was essentially outsourcing. Many of the games developed by these studios, while big enough to often be casually classified as 'AAA' (whatever that means...) were not of the same ilk as the work being done by the other studios these same publishers own in other countries. The Ubisoft studios in Montreal, for example, or Rockstar North were not making licenced games such as Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots (Blue Tongue), The Last Airbender (THQ Studio Australia). Nor are those other studios tasked with sequels like De Blob 2 (Blue Tongue) or Star Wars game after Star Wars game (Pandemic and Krome). So many Star Wars games...

This isn't to cast dispersion on the work that was done by those studios, but as a bit of a reality-check. These studios weren't valued for their original creations, they were used by the larger companies that owned them to produce the middle-range film tie-ins and other licenced material. We were a high-quality outsource location, not a producer of original, unique content. Consider Pandemic, who produced the Saboteur--an original IP and a game I really quite liked--who were promptly shut down after its release. My goals with the work I do at the university is to equip my graduates with skills that enable them to do much more than follow a brief handed down from the licence lawyers at International Publisher Headquarters via email. I want my students to be the creators of art, not the factory workers of the videogame industry. I really hope I'm not the only one in Australia who wants this.

The question is, if Australia is a world-class country full of the talent that international corporations are willing to invest in, willing to recruit into their closer-to-home studios, why are we acting like an outsource location? Why aren't we, as Australians, creating our own original content and keeping control over our IP and our industry? Why are practically all the major studios (including Firemint now) owned and operated by overseas publishers/developers?

Obviously the game development scene in Australia needs a bit of a boost if it is to continue. I am not a proponent of the "let's just all make iPhone games forever!" attitude. Those kinds of games already don't need the kind of help I'm talking about, and they do not have the kind of potential I will describe below. They lay a great foundation for where we need to go from here: the kind of game you pay $30-40AU for on Steam, right up to genuine AAA games. Personally, I like the big-budget, richly immersive games that take me to another place and time, cast me in an exotic role, and tell me a new story. I am really tired of tapping cartoons on my iPhone. I like the games that give me a little something to think about other than how to knock down the next pile of sticks and ice blocks. There is no reason these can't be made in Australia. Videogames are not a physical resource that has to be mined from the ground. They can come from anywhere.

These kinds of games require an investment framework that allows them to work for a number of months or years towards a large-scale, higher-risk release. Yes, there is risk. This is why the international investment has dried up: the cost of doing business in Australia no longer outweighs the risk associated with larger development projects--even projects assured of some degree of success because of their licences. As the global economy has struggled over the past few years, the Australian dollar has become increasingly valuable, so the cost to foreign companies rises. If the invesetor was Australian, however, they might not run for the hills the moment our currency reaches parity with the US dollar. Its a tragic situation when, as our economy actually shows some strength and resilience, this particular sector all but collapses because the whole paradigm relies on the weakness of the dollar through the late 90s.

So, yes, there is a lot of room for governmental incentives of the sort Canada offer to court the big players back to Australia. But there is even more room for better incentives to encourage Australian investors to set up an end-to-end development and distribution industry locally that does not rely on international investment. International sales? Absolutely, go for it. But we shouldn't be waiting around asking for permission from the big American publishers to make our own products. We shouldn't consider ourselves lucky for being able to work on something that Rockstar North or Ubisoft or THQ Montreal don't want to because they are too busy with Grand Theft Auto 5, FarCry 3 or Warhammer games.

That image at the top of this post is of a sunset, and is one of the saddest pictures I think I've ever seen. But, even if this is an end of an era, we have the opportunity to start a new one. Its a lot of hard work, believe me, I know. There weren't any game design or studies units at Macquarie University when I got here, there certainly weren't any degrees or majors in the area. There are now. This stuff can be done. It will be done, so long as we don't give up. We could flip that image of sunset around so the game development industry is looking into dawn instead.