Kuala Lumpur: The Beginning of something BIG

Our final stop brought us to Kuala Lumpur, capital city of Malaysia and the new home of GameFounders Asia. We knew it was going to be a big event to finish off, and KL gave us an amazing welcome.

Malaysia’s is well placed to take advantage of global gaming growth. Not only is it part of the fastest growing games region in the World, but it is the second largest market within SE Asia, measured at $214m in revenues for 2014. English is spoken widely, and is used regularly as the language for business.

Malaysian mobile gamers are a generous lot, contributing $32.61 per paying user. The combined audience for gamers is over 14m, and just less than half (6.6m) spend money on mobile games.

Games are not limited to mobile in Malaysia with over a quarter of gamers owning four platforms (typically PC, console, tablet and mobile). As is commonplace throughout the region, Strategy games top the charts followed closely by Racing games and Action/Adventure games.

Consoles are popular but PCs and mobile platforms lead the way. On mobile, the market is evenly split in terms of units between Android and iOS, but in terms of revenue iOS has a slight but appreciable advantage.

The event itself was an all day affair celebrating the launch of GameFounders Asia. We started with a gathering of ASEAN game associations to a roundtable to discuss how to better cooperate with each other for the betterment of the game development community across the region. Associations from Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, The Philippines and Malaysia all presented to the group about the status of their respective communities. It was incredibly productive and we felt privileged to be a part of it.

Next up was some fun with a Game Show featuring MDeC execs, Hasnul Hadi Samsudin and Muhu Muhundhan giving their all as hosts. The room was split into four teams with GameFounders and MDeC execs as their leaders. The four teams were appropriately named from games as – Pacman, Donkey Kong, Mario and Sonic. The representatives from the SE Asia roundtable formed judges as each team would them a question with points handed out for the best question of the round. Competition was fierce but in the end both teams with GameFounders involvement lost out to Donkey Kong in a tie break!

Next up was the presentations and the crowd was already in a great mood as we gave the final sessions of the tour. Speakers included: Aik Siow Wee of MDeC, Joyce Law of Unity3D, Alex Fernandez of Streamline Media Group and GameFounder’s own Andrew Walker.

Kuala Lumpur

Even the pitching was a close contest as we had another excellent batch of pitches including one person who had come all the way from Sri Lanka! In the end we had a tie break decided by the audience and Gerrald Cheam won the free Professional License of Unity3D. It was a tough call but the audience decided it.

So at the end of an amazing day, we knew that we were at the start of something special. We had made so many new friends across the region during our grueling tour. We had seen so many different places and had a lot of adventures as we crisscrossed SE Asia. But the biggest adventure is yet to come, as our plans for our first program in SE Asia take shape.

Remember Applications are still open to June 30th!

Come be part of the Adventure and don’t let geography stop you!

EVENT PHOTOS



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