Joe Procopio
A few months ago, I was sitting in John Austin?s office at gaming incubator Joystick Labs with Austin and John O?Neill, president of Spark Plug Games). I was mostly there trying to score free games, or at least cheat codes, and I also wound up accidentally writing about the North Carolina Gaming Roundtable they were about to take part in.
As we were killing time playing Dr. Mario, I nonchalantly asked if either of them had an exact figure on the number of gaming startups in the RTP.
While Austin reached into his desk and pulled out a stack of spreadsheets, lists, and what looked like a Simon, O?Neill whipped our his smartphone and started going through his contacts.
I give them huge credit for taking that random question so seriously, but the truth is no one really knows how many there are.
But we?re going to find out. Or at least Ben Moore is going to give us our best guess.
Gamers Unite!
Moore does marketing and PR for Mighty Rabbit Studios , an independent game development shop in Raleigh, currently working on the Saturday Morning RPG series, which is exactly what it sounds like and better have a Harlem Globetrotters mystery level. I sat down with Moore and Matte Wagner, founder of Pangolin as well as an audio engineer at Red Storm.
Moore is one of the drivers, along with Mighty Rabbit co-founder Alan Youngblood, of Raleigh Game On, a first-ever get together of local independent developers to show off their wares, celebrate independent gaming, and hopefully cement a community that has a lot of members, a lot of camaraderie, a lot of promise, but very little cohesion.
Game On is Monday, August 29th at 7:00 p.m. at the Hive in downtown Raleigh. It?s free to attend, and I suggest you do. I?m telling you this because I know a little something about this kind of event.
They Stole My Idea!
About six months ago, I was at a reception that followed some kind of investor or tech startup conference, and I was half-joking that the reception, that?s the part at the end with beer and no Powerpoint, was what I most looked forward to.
Hey, I know a brewery owner, I thought. I should start an event and have it just be that part at the end where everyone is having fun. I made that joke in a column, someone read it and relayed it at a dinner a week later, whereupon someone else immediately said I should do it for real.
Fast forward to September 12th, which will be the fifth iteration of this event, now called ExitEvent, a free beer, loud music, no-nametags monthly social exclusive to RTP entrepreneurs and their employees. Within six months, it?s grown from a bad joke to 200 people from 85 startups.
Shameless Plug Over
Did you know there were 85 startups in the RTP?
Yeah, me neither, and I definitely should have. My point is the reason why ExitEvent blew up so quickly had nothing to do with me or the free beer. I just lit the match. It exploded because the entrepreneurs were out there and they wanted something like this.
So back to the question: How many gaming startups are there in the RTP?
Trick Question
The question is probably unanswerable, at least for now. A good guess is: Tons.
Thanks to mobile and social, there are lots of opportunities for smaller games, smaller budgets and smaller companies to be successful right out of the gate. Wagner says that these companies didn?t have the option of the mass mobile market until very recently, not 5 years ago, not really even two years ago.
Yes. In the world of mobile gaming, 2009 was like the dark ages.
Developers have also been taking notice of success stories like Rovio and the amount of reward achieved for the pittance of resources spent. Today, hobbyists are getting serious. Cogs at big companies are jumping ship to helm their own. It?s almost stupid that it?s not more of a gold rush than it already is.
But a lot of these little companies are working in a vacuum. When they get to a certain point, they all tend to run into the same obstacle: They can?t find the right person to join the team. They need a network, at least a central cortex, to bring about what Moore calls the ?I know a guy? syndrome.
So, You Know, Game On
This is the purpose of Game On. Moore says that for the smaller developers, there really isn?t a central get together beyond the once-a-year East Coast Game Conference. I?ve been to that conference since its inaugural, and I?m always surprised by two things.
One. There is literally almost no connection between the RTP tech startup ecosystem and the RTP gaming ecosystem. It?s there, but it?s thin. I can count on one hand the number of people I run into at both the startup events and the gaming events. This should not be and I?ve sort of made it my goal to try to build that bridge.
Out of Legos, of course.
Two. The RTP startup ecosystem, as open and helpful as it is, could probably learn a few things from the RTP gaming ecosystem. These folks are tight, always helpful to each other and to outsiders like me. In this sense, the gaming ecosystem is a lot like the music ecosystem, where they?re willing to introduce, cross-promote, and even sit in on a project just because they love doing what they do.
They Want to Reach Your Grandmother
And it isn?t like the community has no structure at all. Alex Macris? awesome Escapist magazine and Triangle Gaming Initiative (which also has a monthly social), is a very good start.
But the ECGC and the TGI are by developers for developers. In order to get the local gaming community to grow, they not only need to connect and reconnect with the developers, but also reach out to the developer wanna-bes and, ultimately, the gamers themselves.
This is more difficult than it was two years ago. Wagner points out that with that same mass mobile market as the distribution method, all sorts of people are now exposed to games and have an idea of how a game should play, casual vs. hardcore is dying down, if not almost irrelevant.
Plus smart phone penetration is still relatively small, compared to other delivery media ? televisions, for example, or even PCs/Laptops. In other words, gamers are everywhere, they?re everyone. They?re pretty much you?re grandmother.
Well, they don?t want to reach your grandmother, but the point is the universe is expanding.
Here?s Your SETI
Moore hopes to at least diagram that expansion with Game On as a first attempt. He wants to grow Game On to be a central hub for the independent community of local developers to collaborate and trade ideas. If it works, they bring more people in, and the result is more ideas and more collaboration.
But there?s an added competition element to Game On. Companies will give a two minute intro on who they are and what they?re working on, and there will be stations set up for attendees to give the game a try. At the end of the evening, a Best in Show will be chosen and a trophy awarded, which the winner keeps until the next Game On (TBD).
Battle of the Bands!
The trophy is named the Ben G. Russell Cup, after a friend within the gaming community who passed away before he had the chance to take off. Again, this shows that the community is there, it just needs cohesion.
And this initial Game On is only the first step. Moore and Wagner don?t yet know what they don?t know, in terms of what?s out there that they?re not taking advantage of.
But while they?re counting new companies at the first Game On, they?ll figure this out too
Joe Procopio heads up product engineering for tech media startup StatSheet. He also owns consulting firm Intrepid Company and creative network Intrepid Media and runs the startup social ExitEvent.? Joe can be reached via Twitter @jproco (http://www.twitter.com/jproco) and read at joeprocopio.com.
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Tags: Events, game developers, Joe Procopio, Joystick Labs, Mighty Rabbit Studios, Raleigh Game On, Sparkplug Games, StatSheet
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