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[PATV] Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 6, Ep. 9: Global Games: Mexico, Argentina &
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
This week, we take a look at some more Latin American nations and their potential for game industry growth.
Come discuss this topic in the forums!
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This kind of stuff excites me. I'd love to have new producers of games come out and mix up the product variety with more culturally diverse games. Can't wait to hear about other locals in the coming episodes!
To Seek,
To Learn,
To Do.
-QFG2
If the speed of light is faster then the speed of sound, is that why people always appear bright until they speak? o_O
Another problem is that why should we support the local market when older people with credit cards can get goods from Steam and Amazon.com.
Also, education is another problem. Some places like Mexico City and Monterrey might have the manpower to start a few studios but mostly on mobile. As someone who would like to make games with Unity, I have to relearn a lot stuff from engineering due to outdated and incompetent teachers in my college.
BTW, piracy is quite common here. Look for "Tepito" and "piracy" on the web to get an idea.
"We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves." - Made in USA
http://latam.square-enix.com/en/node/47
Brazil doesn't have any real games education or infrastructure to speak of and Argentina has major economic and import issues that hamstring it from forming a development community.
The two regions have different "gaming scenes", at least in the consumer sense. Mexicans from the nothern region have access to US stores and US addresses (Such as PO Boxes or relative's houses.) Which allows mexicans to enjoy the advantages of the US market. I know I have. I can't speak for the biggest city (Monterrey) but AFAIK (I have two years living here now.), there isn't a lot of dedicated videogame stores (You can find games at big chain stores.) in Mexican northern states. It's usually better just to travel to the US and get your games there (Cheaper and with more variety of games.).
Now, at the center region you can find dedicated game stores, but they are expensive (But I guess not as expensive compared to the travelling costs of going to the US to get games.). A game can be worth from 600 to 900 pesos (Keep in mind that the average minimum wage per month in México is around 9000 pesos.) so they are really expensive. People do buy them though (Middle and Upper class people do.), although there is a bigger pirate market.
There is a HUGE pirate market in México, there are places with several booths filled with pirate games and places that will modify your console to play games. When you can get a game for 10 pesos and your console modified for 1000 or even less (I've become a steam PC gamer due to all of this, so I'm not really sure of the current prices, I can find out if you wish.), for a lot of people it's a good idea to "invest" in a modified console.
Still, I'm older now, and most of my gamer friends are older too, they earn a decent mount of money and get original games. Although I must say that most of the time mexicans will buy consoles just for fifa and COD games (Just like Americans get Madden.). There is a consumer market, I think it's just a really special one.
Also, whoo battle on the bridge and such.
First of all, if you think Mexicans don't spend as much money on games as Brazilians do, you're wrong. You're very very very wrong. People in Mexico spend a lot of money on games, mostly pirate games like Brazil.
Also, consider the fact that Brazil is waaay behind in technology due to their ridiculous laws about tech imports. When Mexico got the wii (same time as in the US), while in Brazil they were still playing with the N64. That's two generations behind.
Also, education in Mexico is not bad. It has some of the best universities in the world (like UNAM), and almost everyone with a college education speaks at least 2 languages and can find their own country in a map. Can't say that about most Americans.
I'm quite disappointed on you guys.
It doesn’t matter if the wealth is distributed evenly or not. If everyone in a country has exactly the same amount of wealth, but they are all extremely poor, that county wouldn't be viable for AAA games. At the same time if a country’s distribution of wealth ranged widely, but even those on the low end were quite well of, that country would be a great place for games financially.
As a mexican, and as a game developer (who studied in the US and has worked developing games in 3 countries, including Mexico, in 3 different continents), I can safely say that this video is absolutely wrong and misleading.
I will heed that their analysis of the Mexican market left something to be desired, but what's this about Brazil being two generations behind Mexico I'm reading about? As far as I know, and from what I've gathered, they've kept up with the rest of the world, albeit with a slight lag behind the others, but nothing so hyperbolic as what you've stated. Am I just misunderstanding something or what?
So, wait, you have a game developer who worked in Mexico telling you from personal experience that the video is wrong, and your rebuttal is your own personal opinion?
EVERYONE WORLD WIDE, Latin america, FRIGGIN HAS a HUGE videogame-consumer market, the only reason we buy mostly pirated its because of ridiculous pricing.
For example, here in venezuela, you know, that super communist country from hell that is believed to be the poorest country of Latin america due to the goverment, anyway, here since there is no easy and safe pirating for ps3 games, people DO buy PS3 games, and guess what? they buy games that in america are priced at 60$, you know at which price? FUKIN 230$, and they do sell, so damn well, you would never believe it. If we just had actual reasonable prices, like americans, europeans and asians do have, we wounl't pirate so damn much, it would slowly become a non pirate market fast enough.
Now on developing, its just a thing about actual indie who lit the fire, the same way it happened on brazil and south corea.
The Canadian development market (especially Big ticket games) are mainly just an extension of the US game development market. Even before the EA buyout of Bioware there wasn't really anything about any development company with offices in Canada that could be called uniquely Canadian. It was either an extension of another countries development in spirit (like BioWare) or in physicality (countless {insert company name} {insert Canadian city}).
And after listening to the part of the cartels does this mean we can call EA a cartel now?
Soooo because Canada's USA's neighbour, it doesn't matter if it's the third biggest country in the worldwide video game industry? There are over 40 videogame studios in Montreal where I live, most of the are NOT extensions of American companies. Same goes for Toronto and Vancouver. Canada is a big player in the industry, for once we're not just America's hat. Would it kill you to let us be proud of what we're good at?
I'm just so happy that I already had the outro music on my cell phone, does that make me a hipster?
Just because you can't tell the difference between Canadian and American culture, doesn't mean the rest of us can't.
I'd also like to see a discussion about Canada's place in the game development world.
Canada has a relatively small and heavily flung apart population that's divided by language. Yet it plays a lead role in global game development much beyond what you'd expect. The development community is vibrant and successful, for some reason. In fact the place basically stands shoulder to shoulder with the United States and Japan on the subject, and that should worth a couple minutes of everyone's time.
Mexico cannot develop because our government is interested only in increasing its own wealth, and in the mean time... well, a new saying popped up: Working class has no work, middle class has no means and high class has no class.
It saddens me to say this, but that's roughly what Mexico is like right now
It's like the film industry, all our talented film makers are elsewhere working or looking for a job, while the mexican films are getting worse each year. I know that many americans hate mexican immigrants for many good reasons, but trust me, we are also losing with the human capital flight.
Piracy is another issue. According to NewZoo mexicans spent 1.2 billion dollars in games on 2011: http://www.newzoo.com/infographics/infographic-2011-mexico/
With an 18.5% annual growth this should be a little more than 1.4 billion dollars on 2012, still low for a 116 million people country.
We have almost the same number of active gamers as the entire population of Chile, but each gamer spends an average of $75USD on games every year! I guess this doesn't count the $3 illegal copies of console games. You will need to lower the game prices a lot to convince them to buy legal copies, and new distribution channels to reach the piracy users.
I'm glad Chile and Argentina are taken into consideration in the debate, as I am hoping for their indie projects to continue.
But when I think about the gaming market in latin america it always bugs me that it's so full of people willing to pay double price (or more) for the same game in the USA, and for products not even in their native language most of the time. True, piracy is a common thing in this environment. But that does not stop legal copies to be sold. We buy everything we can that drops down from the USA (if it's worthy). But it's like we are never taken seriously. For example, it was announced that Chile would get the pikachu themed 3DS. It never got here. Probably never will. And nobody cares, it's not important, is it?
I'm curious as how much revenue Steam makes from latin america, as they offer the same service and same prices all over the continent. Haven't seen so much pc game piracy since Steam got popular around here.
Last but not least... is the image at 3:37 supposed to be Argentina vs Chile? Because if that is the chilean flag, the stripes are all wrong... it's just two... just saying...
(probably the image got recycled from a USA flag).
Coming in late to this discussion but I couldn't help noticing you pointing out your interest in discussing the game industry in Norway. I would actually be very interested in seeing you talk about the gaming scene in all the Nordic countries in general, not just Norway.
I mean, Finland is the birthplace of Angry birds, which was a surreally big hit and there are some very interesting games being developed in Sweden. As for Iceland, I've seen you mention Eve online, few times. It's interesting to note that CCP, the company behind that game is making a noticeable impact on the economy of the country, due to how small it is. As a result, it has banded together with other software/game developer companies to make a very powerful special interest group that's demanded for software development as a recognized and respected industry. This has had a big impact on media coverage and education in the area, causing growing interest in gaming development.
So while none of this may be as big as the industry in the Norway, I wouldn't be surprised that you'll soon be hearing allot more from the other countries and thus deserving of some scrutiny.