Post by Dan @ 12:21pm 15/11/12 | 38 Comments
"This $20 million fund will help build a sustainable base for the Australian interactive entertainment industry to respond and grow in a global market expected to reach $90.1 billion by 2015," Mr Crean said.Funding guidelines will be developed by Screen Australia, with $5M to be delivered for the first, and second fiscal years, and $10M in the third.
"Australian games studios are recognised internationally for their skill and originality in developing interactive games played all over the world but the local industry is coming under increased pressure in the midst of a major market shift.
"This fund will assist the sector to reclaim their competitive advantage and support the development of games in Australia, investing in the intellectual property of our creative businesses to give them a stronger position internationally.
"This is a substantial investment to foster this growing sector where artists, musicians, writers, performers and software developers collaborate to meet the local and global demand for interactive entertainment and education.
"'The gaming sector is in many ways the natural extension of film. On Tuesday I visited the Fox Studios set of The Wolverine in Sydney which as a franchise has been adapted on almost every gaming platform.
"The sector is a major employer and local start-up companies like Melbourne-based Voxel Agents have seen their Train Conductor series downloaded more than five mllion times. More established companies like Brisbane's Halfbrick Studios had their game Fruit Ninja downloaded 300 million times.
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Posted 12:24pm 15/11/12
Posted 08:07pm 15/11/12
Posted 08:11pm 15/11/12
Realistically, most any game short of those with voice acting, orchestra music, or special textures, can be produced for under $15k per year per dev, if they're committed, and not expecting to live luxuriously while getting tax payer investment.
Posted 08:59pm 15/11/12
Posted 01:31am 16/11/12
No you don't, I've been on welfare, it's about $12k a year. I've also been doing some fantastic development while burning my savings and some contracting for about $10 to $15k a year for a while now, it's not an expensive activity, and used to live on that when working salary too (saved the rest), and half that when I was a student/part time worker, also programming (cheap shared housing situations - accommodation is always the main cost, but $15k a year is very doable, I'm realistically probably doing 9 atm, before a few unnecessary things like fancy phone/camping/truckloads of milk for coffee/endless steam sales...).
Posted 09:27pm 15/11/12
Posted 01:31am 16/11/12
Posted 09:56pm 15/11/12
Like all funding it's designed to provide assistance not the total funding.
Posted 12:21am 16/11/12
Anyone accepting a game dev employment offer of 15k per year in 2012 either has a large quantity of equity options or a large quantity of stupid. (maybe both)
Posted 01:02am 16/11/12
In actual costs, you can fund development for under $15k a year, if you're actually trying to start something up and not just expecting a cushy job from the government. If somebody is supposedly worth more than that, then they should already have working capital from when they proved that claim.
Posted 08:10am 16/11/12
Posted 09:50am 16/11/12
er.. how is it sustainable if they throw money at it, its like car manufacturing in Australia.
Posted 10:36am 16/11/12
Posted 12:12pm 16/11/12
Will have some more information available about what is happening in Brisbane specifically along these lines as well. Exciting times if you are, or want to be, an indie game developer.
Posted 12:22pm 16/11/12
Posted 12:52pm 16/11/12
I can't speak for the federal government scheme (I haven't read the proposal/plan in any great detail) but if the goal is to encourage independent game developers to try to do awesome stuff in the mobile/casual space, I think it's a great idea. It's a s***load easier to make the next Angry Birds than it is to try to make the next WoW.
The game development graveyard is full of dead WoW clones and dead Angry Birds clones alike, but the latter cost a f***load less to fail. Those are the ones I would rather see the government investing in, rather than (for example) giving $2m to already-existing companies (cough, Auran, cough).
I look forward to seeing how the Screen Australia writes the funding guidelines; I hope they focus on small scale startup style stuff.
Posted 01:23pm 16/11/12
A good example is funding for training/further education. I got 5 staff through a Cert IV in Training and Assessing with govt funding. Total cost was probably about $25K but the govt coughed up most of it and we paid $1K per person as our contribution. *(not exact numbers but you get the point)
So in this case I would assume the same criteria. EG. a small indie might need $100K to get some hardware/software or perhaps a years rent or an employee with a specific skill set, like graphic design for backgrounds etc. So they apply and hopefully get approved and can move ahead. So if you extrapolate this with the numbers mentioned you could fund 50 developers that just need that little bit of extra capital to allow them to get the game out.
It is not designed to pay out a lump sum for a full production of a game from inception to store.
Posted 01:32pm 16/11/12
All this really sounds like is an extension of the program that Victoria has already had in place for the past 8 years or so, just with some more funds behind it. They've already had a program in place to fund smaller indie projects, but I think it only had about 1.5 million a year behind it, so its just been increased. Can't see it really making much of a change to the status quo.
Posted 02:19pm 16/11/12
Posted 02:42pm 16/11/12
Dunno, seems like exactly the right place to spend the money to me. Government funding is like a sprinkle to spark growth and maybe create a few viable, independent companies, a bit like the MS bizspark program.
Investing in larger companies just creates dependence on subsidies and grants.
Posted 02:59pm 16/11/12
Meh, I was just basing it off of the numbers that I've survived on for my entire life. Most of what's involved in game dev isn't expensive, unless you're hiring somebody else to do it for you.
Posted 04:11pm 16/11/12
The major input is labour, which is expensive. It's illegal to hire a full-time employee for 15k per year.
Posted 04:37pm 16/11/12
Posted 05:55pm 16/11/12
More typically they focus on barriers to entry, like legal advice and costs, costs associated with exporting, insurance or the like, but the core costs (ie, risk) to develop a new thing is primarily borne by the equity owner. The idea is to avert potential abuse.
Its possible that subsidies for salaries could be included but it seems unlikely as these are input costs. Maybe premises and the like?
I could be wrong but that's been my experience anyway.
Posted 06:15pm 16/11/12
Apparently a few published game devs have launched from that - http://indiebits.com/neis-australias-secret-weapon-for-indie-startup-funding/
Posted 06:15pm 16/11/12
The company I worked for in melbourne, Red Tribe, applied for the old grant and I think we got a few hundred thousand (might have been less) from it towards an original IP that we were working on. We had to prepare an assload of documentation for it, and we built a protoype especially for the Film Victoria guys and they came to the office multiple times and even then we only *just* got it. But I think its like Hoggy said, I think part of the problem was they didn't want to give money to a company to pay wages or whatever, I'm pretty sure in the end we got it to help with trying to push the game overseas and market it to publishers, etc, rather than just a chunk of cash to subsidise day-to-day costs.
Not that it helped cos the company still went broke =\
Posted 06:21pm 16/11/12
A grant is a little more involved normally.
Posted 11:51pm 16/11/12
Posted 11:27pm 16/11/12
:-/
(Ok, they do other things - source: The Australian - but still, I think this $20mil is token funding)
Posted 01:10am 17/11/12
Posted 01:57am 17/11/12
Posted 03:02am 17/11/12
With a feature complete renderer and animation system, I could pump out junk like no tomorrow. I've recently built from the ground up a browser based renderer which writes every pixel, renders models, perspective correct textures, directional lights, shadowmaps, texture blending, scene graphing, etc. Still needs AA, and my head was thrown a little by the best way to apply forward kinematics for the unique scenario that I'm building it for, but jesus if I had a renderer to start with, the rest would have been gravy. And the rest is pretty damn complex by itself even by regular desktop gaming standards, let alone a browser based server run mmo-thing situation. Other devs need to get better and program stuff on the cheap before setting up luxerious office structures and the like, is basically what I'm saying. :P
Posted 03:11am 17/11/12
It also has quite a nice editor and content creation pipeline, and since roughly on average when you're making a game you'll spend about five times as many man hours building content than you do coding stuff, the importantance of having a powerful and easy to use content creation pipeline can't be underestimated. Anything I do in the future I'll be using Unity for, its just pure awesome.
Posted 03:35am 17/11/12
For browser games (and by extension, browser on mobile), I think that plugins beyond flash are suicide for now.
In my case, content and code are so intertwined that they're basically the same thing. Doing a ton of cool procedural & simulation stuff which wouldn't be doable without some crazy ass backend code, on both client and server, and when I started out HTML5 was basically just a dream which IE was seemingly never going to implement, so I had to build a whole browser embedded javascript platform without any libraries.
Posted 12:24pm 17/11/12
no idea what you're doing dude but that line freaks me the f*** out
Posted 04:40pm 17/11/12
Posted 06:15pm 17/11/12
What plugin? Its a game engine, it makes games, you install game, you play game. Do you install a plugin before you play Borderlands 2 or Call of Duty or Braid or Bastion? If you target it at web it probably needs a plugin, but I'm talking about making a PC executable (or Mac executable, or Android executable, or IOS executable, or PS3, or XBox 360, or any of the other platforms Unity can target). I believe Unity 4.0 can natively target flash anyway though.
I'm extremely wary of anyone claiming to not need content for their game because its all generated procedurally. The last person I know who claimed that was a guy I used to work with who was bats*** crazy. Heres the website for his game, he entered it in an Intel independant games competition under a fake name because he is afraid the computer mafia is after him. And I'm not even joking.
Posted 06:29pm 17/11/12
I know how difficult procedural content is and I don't mean to suggest that everything is procedural (there's a lot of 3d modelling and animation work yet to be done, really the last big component after I finish some current things), but my overall point was just that sometimes the unique game mechanics are a large part of the content, in that they enable a different sort of game. In say the minecraft context, programming the features is the main concern, content is pretty simple and not the majority of the work.
Although, on a related note, I'd be doubtful that unity could compile a portable codebase to efficient native flash, if that's how it works. I know that any overhead due to cross compilation to JavaScript absolutely destroys it (Google Dart as an example).