Games firm hiring in Auckland

Dunedin games firm Rocketwerkz plans to hire about 60 staff in Auckland by the end of the year to build a ‘‘survival genre’’ computer game.

Chief executive Dean Hall said the game would have a budget of more than $20 million. Chinese technology giant Tencent has a minority stake in the firm and bought perhaps the country’s best-known games-maker, Grinding Gear Games, for a sum known to exceed $100m last year.

Hall said that while most details of its new game were under wraps at the moment, it would be a ‘‘first-person’’ game for PCS and consoles and possibly other platforms. ‘‘Very much mutli-platform would be the best way to describe it.’’

He expected Rocketwerkz would be able to reveal more towards the end of this year.

‘‘Part of this is to experiment with doing quite a lot of the development through social media.

‘‘The project is under way and we want to have it out in a few years. By the end of the year we’ll plan to be quite a lot more public about where the game is at and what it is going to be.’’

Rocketwerkz currently employs 50 staff in Dunedin and Hall said the median salary was about $80,000.

It had hired about five people in Auckland and would be looking for waterfront premises in the central city, he said.

Some people wanted to ‘‘live it up’’ in the Auckland CBD and others preferred the ‘‘familyfriendly’’ environment of Dunedin, where ‘‘dollars went a bit further’’, so having two offices would provide staff with more choices, he said.

The dual offices would also make it easier to keep projects separate so resources didn’t get cannibalised, he said.

Hall’s roots lay in ‘‘indy’’ games such as zombie-apocalypse game Dayz, but Rocketwerkz was pivoting towards ‘‘triple-a’’ projects – a term that denotes larger projects with higher development and marketing budgets that are more akin to ‘‘blockbuster’’ films.’’

‘‘We have been shifting this year towards that, both in Dunedin and in Auckland.’’

The company had not found hiring difficult so far, he said.

‘‘We have been recruiting staff out of Weta and other video-game studios both here and overseas.’’

The Game Developers Association released a report last month that forecast the ‘‘interactive media and games sector’’ could be a $1 billion export industry by 2024, after generating sales worth $143m last year.

It called for a government rulechange that would allow businesses in the sector to access incentives currently provided to the film industry, saying that such a move would create ‘‘hundreds of hi-tech and creative industry jobs’’.