Mike Bantick
Wednesday, 19 November 2008 15:11
Opinion and Analysis
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Reading that headline you will be forgiven for thinking that game developers are about to sell out to the big film studios to suck your soul from your head with a steady stream of movie tie in games as development money dries up.
The Game Connect Asia Pacific conference for 2008 has kicked off in Brisbane. Well almost, the majority of today was taken up with the Screen Forum discussion.
The conference itself kicks in proper tomorrow, but this morning delegates were treated to a lively discussion loosely based on the overarching questions of the integration of Australian Film, TV and Game development.
The depleted panel was chaired by Tantalus Media CEO Tom Crago, and consisted of Jackie Turnure, Head of Development & Production at Hoodlem, Colin South, Producer and co-founder of Media World and Rob Murray, CEO of developer Firemint. Not taking their place for various reasons were Marcus Gillezeau, Firelight Productions and Mike Fegan, CEO of Transmission Games.
Hoodlum have been responsible for winning 2 BAFTA awards and specialise in multimodal ties with popular TV shows such as Spooks, Emmerdale and Lost. Turnure spoke of the Hoodlum experience, touching on how the company approached the projects brief to keep interest up between series’ of the popular shows.
Generally this involved development of original film material coupled with a web game interface, and in the case of Lost an associated presence at Comic-Con that extended the process even further. This project was, however brought to a grinding halt prior to the planned “third phase” when funding was cut. This left 180,000 fans hanging on a typical Lost style cliff hanger which the company had to spin up a new (let down) story to save face.
On the Emmerdale project Hoodlum was able to rack up a demographic of 55 year old females that spent an average of 21 minutes gaming on the project’s website.
Murray – whose company focuses on mobile gaming products sees the web outlet as just another window of engagement for a particular IP (Intellectual Property). With mobile gaming the approach would be to use the web to keep a brand alive, but direct “paying” customers to the actual mobile content.
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