Last week, the Media Development Authority of Singapore (MDA) unveiled the Games Solution Centre (GSC), a facility designed to be a one-stop resource centre for small and medium game enterprises in Singapore to develop local games.
It certainly sounds promising. The GSC will also house Southeast Asia’s first Playstation Incubation Studio, which will give Singaporean game developers access to development tools for Playstation platforms. Global companies like Hewlett-Packard support the Studio, and monthly seminars and developer conferences have also been promised, along with new grant schemes from the MDA.
Channel News Asia reported primarily positive responses at its launch, but perhaps they weren’t going all the way to the ground.
Game development graduate Patrick Hoo, 23, feels that the GSC is more hype than anything else. “To the public, it is good business and job opportunities,” he says, “but in the real world, there are not enough jobs for these game developers.
“If you go to any of the small firms in Singapore, all you will find are programmers who come from India.”
If a local developer is not even going to be able to make it into a local SME, then who will the GSC be benefitting?
Gerald Wong, also 23, is about to graduate from DigiPen Institute of Technology. When asked what he felt about the GSC, he said that the real question was whether his fellow graduates and himself would even graduate to work here in Singapore, or if they would go overseas.
However a spokesperson from a consulting firm for successful game development companies in China, who did not wish to be named, was a little more positive, albeit in a backhanded manner.
“I think the new initiative will definitely help many aspiring developers take a keener interest in this industry since it’s being made more accessible in terms of cost.
“But too much spoon feeding is never good. Entrepreneurs are supposed to be resourceful and always seek options. If we carry on with the mindset that by making things easier to do, the habit of taking the easy way out will be created.”
On the other hand, aspiring entrepreneurs like one James Wong, 26, say that should they ever decide to set up a game development company, they will put their game into the GSC, simply “because it’s dirt cheap.”
MDA says that developers “only need to bring their ideas to the Games Solution Centre, get the necessary team together” to be aided along the rest of their way. But the same spokesman from the consulting firm was quick to say that one is only as good as one’s idea if you want grants from the government.
“Out of so many games that Singapore has created, only a handful has actually seen some form of international exposure.” He went on to add that aspiring game developers should see the world for themselves first, before going to the government for help.
