Indonesia- the land of a thousand developers
GameFounders’s second stop on the Big Asia tour was Indonesia, a country with the fastest growing market for games in Southeast Asia. According to Newzoo, in 2014 Indonesia produced 4th largest revenue in games in the region after Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore and was growing the fastest.
Indonesia with its 252m’+ population has 34m gamers, but still only emerging in terms of game developers creating original IP. The developers are struggling to earn money due to only a fraction of the population owning credit cards. PC games are still very popular and the internet cafe model has not lost it’s ground. This is all changing rapidly as both the smartphone penetration and regulations are changing.
The local players include a 3-4 bigger studios as well as inde developers and student teams. The majority of the developers were from Jakarta, but also other cities, especially Bandung with a growing developer community. Stay tuned for interviews with Anton and Rokimas Soeharyo of Touchten Games, Robi Baskoro of and Raymond Kosala of Binus University.
The hunger of the young game developers is obvious when speaking to any of them. GameFounders’ event brought around 80 people to Binus University. Binus has 50 game developers graduating each year from their international and a further 100+ from the national game developer specialisation making them one of the sources of technical talent for the game companies in Jakarta.
GameFounders’ Big Asia Tour included sessions by Evan Spytma, Regional GM for SEA, Oceania and India; Sho Sato is Chief Analyst at Media Create, Anton Soeharyo, Touchten Games, Raymond Kosala of Binus University, Siow Aik Wee of MDec and Andrew Walker, COO and Partner at GameFounders. The local developers showed their games and with standing ovations, Eldwin Viriya of Own Games won a free Unity licence. Congratulations, Eldvin!
The application deadline for GameFounders’ fall 2015 batch is June 20 and there are already a few applications from Indonesia!