New high score
Kiwi game developers break through $100 million barrier
New Zealand game developers have posted a new high score — earning a record $100 million annual industry revenue.
An independent survey of New Zealand Game Developers Association studios showed growth of 12 per cent in the year ended March on the previous year’s $88.9m.
Association board member Stephen Knightly said $100m was a “nice round number” but was more smitten with the double-digit growth in the industry, which includes computer, console and smartphone games.
Knightly said the New Zealand market had proven that game development was not just a “hit” driven business, where big games sell large amounts of copies, but rather, it succeeded well as a “gamesas-a-service” model.
The prime example is Kiwi role-playing game Path of Exile. The game has just launched in China and on Xbox One worldwide.
Path of Exile is free to play, but offers purchases for ingame content.
Knightly said Grinding Gear Games, the studio behind Path of Exile, had consistently worked on the game, fixing problems and providing expansions since it was launched in 2013.
China has overtaken the US in terms of market size, with 600 million gamers generating US$24.6 billion ($34.3b) of the industry's US$101.1b global market value last year, Bloomberg reported.
Grinding Gear Games partnered with Tencent, the world’s largest game publisher, in China for the launch.
Grinding Gear managing director Chris Wilson said the company was lucky to have Tencent as a publishing partner in mainland China.
“They are a powerful company and are very experienced at publishing games like Path of Exile in their region. We have been working together for a couple of years now and are very pleased with the relationship.”
Another example of revenue growth cited by Knightly was Wellingtonbased mobile game developer Pik Pok, which has a suite of more than 30 games on Android and iOS which allows them to draw passive income from older releases.
Entering international markets is a no-brainer for local developers, with 97 per cent of the revenue for New Zealand developers coming from overseas this year, which Knightly said showed the appetite of gamers to seek out new experiences worldwide.
Association chairman James Everett said $100m was great, but the real goal was to grow towards a billion-dollar industry within 10 years.
“With some co-ordinated support to maximise our export potential, that’s achievable,” Everett said.
“Finland’s game industry earned over $4b last year, for example.”
Everett said the main thing holding the sector back was a lack of funding for research and development.