Interview: Tom Crago: President Game Developers Association of Australia

Mike Bantick
Tuesday, 11 August 2009 10:18

Opinion and Analysis

Here is the full text of the interview between iTWire and Tom Crago.  Crago is the President of the Game Developers Association of Australia (GDAA) and CEO of Tantalus software, making games out of Melbourne Australia.  In the interview Crago touches on the upcoming Game Connect Asia Pacific conference, censorship of games in Australia and upcoming Tantalus releases.

The audio of this interview can be found on the Byte Into It podcast website , I began the interview by asking Crago about the upcoming Game Connect Asia Pacific conference which is returning to Melbourne later in the year.

Tom Crago:  We tend to rotate it between Melbourne and Brisbane which are the two hubs for game development in Australia, and this year the conference is going to be held in Melbourne at the Crown Promenade hotel in December.

Mike Bantick:  And who tends to wander along to the conference?

TC:  It tends to be more-or-less for the game development community, we sometimes have students and other members of the public come along, but it really is an event that is designed to cater for people working in video games in Australia, we get representatives from most game development studios, both big and small, as well as a good contingent of developers and publishers from overseas.  We generally have forty to fifty international guests that we welcome to Australia.

TC:  And that’s great because it gives the local developers a chance to hear from experts from other countries, it’s also good from a deal making business, because you know all our business here in Australian video game industry is overseas, it is 100 percent export.  So if you are an Australian game developer wanting to release a game, that involves doing a deal with a company based in Japan, based in Europe, or based in America, there are no publishers based in Australia.

TC:  So what we try to do with this conference is get these publishers over to meet with our studios, and it always happens that there are deals that come out of that.  A few years ago Infinite Interactive met with D3 and as a result they put together a deal to develop PuzzleQuest, which turned into one of the most successful games out of Australia

MB:  Is it an opportunity for independent developers to meet up with publishers as well?

TC:  It absolutely is, and one of the big issues that smaller developers face is just getting that foot in the door, especially when publishers are located in North America or Japan, and what this conference and the GDAA tries to do, is to make that journey a little easier, give those initial introductions.  There are plenty of small Australian studios that are incredibly talented, have terrific technology, but without that initial introduction, are kind of “playing with themselves”.

MB:  Do you see the trend towards casual or “snack” type gaming continuing, especially with Apple and the iPhone on the scene?

TC:  Mate it is definitely true, if we look back even further than the iPhone to the origins of this, perhaps back to the Nintendo DS, and a little later on, the Wii.  And I don’t know if it is a trend more so as the industry realising that there’s a huge trunk of the world there that wants to play video games, that have been ignored by the traditional players and to be honest by us as developers for too long.

TC:  Along comes the Wii and lo and behold there is this whole other market that is very excited about video game, that wants these games to be more accessible, more bite size and perhaps more casual.  And then with the App Store on the iPhone we see that continued.  It is something we are certainly seeing here in Australia with a number of studios who are focusing on mobile game development, or even XBLA or PSN, those smaller games that you can play on your PlayStation 3 or 360.

TC:  We have studios here in Australia that are concentrating on that space very, very well.  The most successful game on the App store ever was developed here in Melbourne, Flight Control, by Firemint, and Rob Murray who is the CEO of Firemint is going to give a presentation at the conference where he is going to go into what made that game a great success, how much money he spent on it, how much money he made, and the very, very clever way in which those guys marketed that game, to propel it to be, literally the most successful iPhone game, iPhone app, ever.

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