Four game studios in one day
On Wednesday last week I spent a very busy day battling through hordes of world youth day pilgrims as I ran around Melbourne visiting four Australian game developers: Firemint, Redtribe, Tantalus and Transmission. I was interviewing CEOs and senior management of these companies as part of an early career researcher grant.
I didn’t really know what to expect as I’d had little contact with the industry in Australia. A few years ago I did visit iD Software in Texas to chat about Urban Terror (which I had been pretty heavily involved with). While that was a great experience and iD was very generous in subsidising my accommodation and travel, I didn’t really feel a warm glow from the US industry. It’s pretty cutthroat over there, and I don’t believe that being followed by hordes of fanboys would improve a person’s overall temperament. My friend Neil Boyd at AIE Canberra did a great job of getting my foot in the door with the local industry, and he had indicated that they were all pretty decent companies with good management.
once I’ve done some more interviews with Australian developers I’ll get the work transcribed and start doing some analysis. While I can already see some interesting themes emerging, the detail is something I’m keeping confidential for now.
I’m hoping that the next interviews will be with 2K Australia (the Bioshock people), because these guys are in Canberra, and so they’re relatively easy for me to contact. After that, Sydney’s likely to be the next, and then later I’ll head over to Brisbane for the last interviews with companies like Krome, Halfbrick and Creative Assembly.
