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E-games - the 'Fury' and the spin

By Malcolm King - posted Monday, 21 January 2008


The call has gone out for young people to make a lucrative career designing electronic games. It’s fab! It’s fun (it’s not really work is it?) and you can become mega rich - but students beware.

In October last year, the media hailed the launch of Fury, a multiplayer online game developed in Brisbane by Auran Studios. The creator of Fury, Tony Hilliam, said his “online masterpiece is about to shake up the world rankings”.

“I believe it's the biggest computer game development project ever undertaken in Australia, and it's even one of the biggest entertainment projects … The original Crocodile Dundee movie budget was about $8 million, and we're nearly double that,” he said.

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Unfortunately things didn’t pan out that way. Just three months later, on the December 15, Auran Studios admitted that the sales of Fury were “disappointing” and it had slashed 60 in-house jobs and was outsourcing future work to China.

"(We) will be looking to China to create much of the new content that we will release in future updates. Furthermore we're talking with a number of publishers in Asia regarding co-development deals," said Hilliam.

The company will “focus on a smaller, more agile core team of Fury developers. These are people who are incredibly passionate about the game and work until four in the morning to ensure they get things done,” he said.

Just three months prior, Hilliam said he stood to make anywhere from millions of dollars to hundreds of millions. You’ve got to admire that optimism.

There are serious problems here. One is the hype surrounding electronic games development. The global games industry is worth about $50 billion of which Australia has a $100 million share. USA and Japan are the powerbrokers.

It’s certainly cheaper to use Chinese animators and programmers. They get paid less and work in sweatshop conditions.

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Fury failed because its developer’s expectations far exceeded market capabilities.

One Melbourne programmer said that “you put in the long hours, in part out of enthusiasm, but also because you’d look like a ‘quitter’ if you left work at 5:00pm. 50-60 hour weeks are the norm and over time is a rarity”. For more on conditions in the Australian games industry Google “Games development: a real career choice?” by Sarah Stokley.

The Australian e-games industry would fair better if it dropped the spin and played it straight. They’re been making astounding claims that 2 million Australians play online games and up to 40 per cent of these are females.

This is utter rubbish. This spin started with various highly enthusiastic submissions to a 2004 Senate Committee examining Australia’s entertainment industry. Budding journalists should use chapter three “Australia’s electronic game industry; size scale and benefits”, as an exercise in debunking dodgy statistics.

According to The Financial Review, Australian Associated Press as well as toy and hobby trade magazines, the total figure of online gamers in Australia is about 200,000 with only 50-70,000 playing at anyone time (higher logons at night). There is a very high attrition rate as the “novelty factor” quickly wears thin, especially among young women. Females make up less than 10 per cent of players. The average age of male players is 19.

That’s not to say that Australian women aren’t playing on-line games. They are, but 90 per cent of them seem to have better things to do. One qualitative survey is particularly bad news for the guys fighting the eternal fight against all things fang-like. Four-hundred young women in the 18-24 age range say guys who play on-line games are “dorks”, “nerds” and “probably need to get a life”.

Women can be so cruel.

The Australian e-games industry claims to be bigger than the Australian film industry. That wouldn’t be hard. The future of our film industry is riding on the back of Baz Luhrmann’s film Australia, made with international backing.

Many online game producers, supported by some large and notable universities of technology (who have especially developed full fee digital games design programs) are lobbying the Federal Government for more money.

Yet as a taxpayer, am I alone in my objections to spending money on projects that should be funded by the private sector? Government funding of online games with their adolescent fascination with slaying monsters or the combat genre, come very low on the agenda after infrastructure development, renewable power generation, massive water conservation projects, building more hospitals and educating school children.

Here’s the legal objection. If the government uses my tax dollars to give the games industry a 30-40 per cent rebate, then the government should seek a share or a dividend from the investment. In short, I would expect the intellectual property to be, in part, owned by the government.

The electronic games industry won’t like to hear that, nor will those universities who have been so vociferous in advocating their games development programs to every kid who has dabbled with Director and/or Flash.

Game Developers Association of Australia president Tom Crago used the launch of Fury to do some pro-games spin.

"We saw it at the last federal budget - a great sweep of initiatives announced for the local film and television industry … We're extremely disappointed that the Federal Government chose not to extend those same initiatives to this other great aspect of our screen culture - video games,” Mr Crago said.

Mr Crago has a point. I’d rather watch wheat grow or read Hansard than watch Australian TV drama (Love My Way being the exception).

It’s also true that employment in games development and design is up. There are about 1,200 people working fulltime in the games design area. If you’re a maths or computer programming whiz, you’re in. The demand for artists and animators though is limp, at best. If you don’t believe me, log on to some of the big Australian employers such as Tantalus and Infinite Interactive.

“There's never been a better time as a student to get into this industry - hopefully the graduate talent pool will be big enough to meet the demand because I anticipate seeing even more hiring from Australian studios in the next 12 months,” said Mr Crago at the Melbourne Games Development Conference last Christmas.

But strangely neither he nor any one else mention the crash of Fury, the most expensive on-line game developed in Australia - with a budget almost twice that of Crocodile Dundee - which went down, like the Titanic, in the icy cold waters of global competition and a high Australian dollar.

He also did not mention that there are approximately 1,000 Australian university and TAFE students enrolled across the credential spectrum all hoping to get jobs on the back of the spin being put out by the Game Developers Association of Australia, the Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia and others.

There will be tears if this type of spin isn’t reeled in.

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Frist published in The Courier-Mail on January 17, 2008.



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About the Author

Malcolm King is a journalist and professional writer. He was an associate director at DEEWR Labour Market Strategy in Canberra and the senior communications strategist at Carnegie Mellon University in Adelaide. He runs a writing business called Republic.

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