First off, I would like to thank Danielle Engels, Communications and PR Manager from Interactive Ontario, for giving me the opportunity to attend the Ontario Game Summit 2008.
The Ontario Game Summit along with GameON: Finance was a two day event (October 28-29 2008) held in Toronto, for the purpose of promoting and growing the video games industry in the province of Ontario. There were invited speakers from many areas related to the games industry including developers, investors, and educators. Speakers were knowledgeable and seemed to have a good understanding of their respective roles and disciplines.
Of the many points raised at the conference, I have noted some of the ones that are most interesting:
- There is an ever broadening game market with more niche audiences. Designers should be creating games for non-traditional, non-hardcore gamers
- Games should be embraced as culture, not just economic
- Ontario needs an in depth analysis of what is needed to create a balance between government-academia-business interaction in order to grow the games industry in the province
- There needs to be a standardization of education and training of new graduates wanting to be in the games industry. This would facilitate the process for companies to find employees (ie programmers, artists, etc.) to fill roles when a new project starts or when replacement workers are required
- Console games are becoming more expensive to produce, so lighter platform (mobile, handheld) developments are increasing because they have a lower production cost
- Ontario has many small companies, but not any large companies (EA, Ubisoft). Ontario companies tend to focus on one hit at a time, and produce fewer games. These companies are generally Ontario owned, and most of their hires come out of Ontario schools
-There is no shortage of talent in art and programming in Ontario, but there is a talent gap on the production side
- Outsourcing seems to not be a concern. Companies feel production needs to be localized for better interaction between everyone involved in a project
- A large company like EA or Ubisoft in Ontario would attract venture capital investment for smaller companies in the province
- Many companies lack a business plan. This is essential in order to show investors that a compnay is viable and will be around for the long term
Overall I thought that OGS was great. The only issue I felt was that the time alloted to certain speakers was sometimes too short. Regardless, the conference had a professional feel to it, far removed from most video games related events that are generally geared towards gamers. Since this event was more focused on the business end of the video games industry, I feel it gives the industry a boost of maturity. One cannot ignore an industry that is increasingly becoming more integrated in people’s daily lives. Afterall, the video games industry is a multi-billion dollar behemoth that seems to be unaffected by the current global economic slowdown.
CanDevs
Posted by Sim@CanDevs 
Posted by Sim@CanDevs 
Posted by Sim@CanDevs 
