Australian government to inject $20 million into local game development over three years
By Tim Colwill on November 15, 2012 at 3:12 pm
In a very welcome move this morning, Arts Minister Simon Crean today announced that $20 million of government funding would be injected into the Australian game development scene over the next three years. The money will be part of the creation of the new Australian Interactive Games Fund, which will deliver $5 million per year until 2013, where it will jump to $10 million in 2014–15.
“‘The gaming sector is in many ways the natural extension of film,” said Minister Crean. “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.”
“Australians are significant consumers of interactive games spending some $1.5 billion last year in retail sales and with ninety two per cent of households owning a device for games.”
Source: Press Release
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One small step out of the dark ages. It’s a damn good start.
I’m sceptical as if this will do anything. It might just prop up indies who will go on to make no money. Honestly, most indies don’t en up making money. The App store and Google Play are just so flooded that barely anyone makes money. The top 2% make 80% of the money or something like that.
We shall see…
That’s because the rest of the 98% is junk. Decent marketing, social media and a decent product should be easy enough to break through that crowd.
If it follows the current trend of government funding (the old film vic grants), most of the money will go to the big studios to pay staff wages for games never intentioned for release. Indies barely saw a dime.