Tapping the potential of PH gaming sector
MANILA, Philippines – The Philippines is missing on the $68-billion global gaming industry because ours is not fully developed yet, an online-game support executive said.
“The Philippines does not have a success story yet [on global video games creation] – but do we have to wait before we start [joining in]?” said chief executive officer Andro Baluyut of GameOps, a member of the Game Development Association of the Philippines (GDAP), in a media briefing Friday, September 20.
According to Baluyut, the Philippines possesses “the creativity” but does not use it to produce global video games.
He cited South Korea as being one of the top countries that benefit from the industry gaining at least $10 million every month.
3 things for gaming companies
Baluyut thus stressed 3 things that the country’s gaming sector should look into.
First, keeping the momentum in the outsourcing of game support services would also “build our own expertise.”
Working towards creation becomes more possible once our local companies have been developed.
He said that though most of the local gaming companies would primarily want to create games such as massively multiplayer-online role-playing games (MMORPG), at this point the closest step we could do to achieve that is to “service these games.”
“The more business there are for this type of companies [gaming support companies], the more resources they will have to fund their own research and development,” added Baluyut.
The next two things would be to focus on programming and on concept and design.
Baluyut shared that the Philippines has the talent especially when it comes to creativity, but Filipinos need more training in other aspects.
“We need the expertise in technical and programming and in other areas to really catch up to a level where we could really create games that could compete on a global scale,” Baluyut stressed.
He highlighted the importance of working with foreign clients.
“That experience [with foreign clients] will be very vital for the first game designed in the Philippines.”
At the same time, exposure to more games develops our expertise. “The more games you get to work with, the more you could design better,” he said. - Rappler.com
