"Outsourcing will serve to fuel our expansion"

Both Inferno and Archies Riverdale Run have been lined up for a release in 2007. While it plans to bank on internal and outsourced projects, the latter would drive the company’s growth. On the domestic front, it would embark on a brand awareness exercise to influence the Indian consumers. The company has offices in Hyderabad and Seattle (USA).

``We are also going to begin our training program, which will be located in another facility in Hyderabad,’’ says Tony Garcia, CEO, FXLabs. Kishore Kumar of CyberMedia News caught up with Garcia. Excerpts from the conversation:

What is the road map of FXLabs? What kind of future do you envisage for the company?

Over the next three to five years, our plan is to expand our production capacity and grow the number of concurrent projects at the studio. We expect both internal and outsourced projects to be part of the growth plan. We are already in the testing phase with many of the large publishing and development companies and expect that outsourcing will serve to fuel our expansion. In addition, we intend to develop local content for the India market.

We believe that India is poised for growth and plan to build brand awareness in the minds of consumers.

When are Inferno and Riverdale Run slated for release?

Both Inferno and Archie’s Riverdale Run are slated for the first half of 2007. These titles are significant investments in both money and manpower and have lengthy development schedules. Typically, videogames can take between 12 to 18 months or more to complete. So we are pretty much in line with the industry standard.

What would be your marketing strategy for these products?

We are designing these products to have as broad market appeal as possible. We are intentionally building the games to be easy to play, but challenging to master, which we believe will keep our customers coming back for more. From a marketing standpoint, we intend to work with our publishing partners to drive awareness through both traditional print ads, and more viral marketing techniques like sponsored forums and community development.

Which are the two Indian films that you have ear-marketed for developing games?

We will be announcing the first of these titles in the month of October. Suffice to say, it will be a major film that everyone knows and we hope to generate a lot of excitement around the game.

How big is the global gaming market?

The global videogame market is over $20 billion with huge growth expected over the next two to three years. The United States, Japan, and Europe are all large well-established markets, but new and emerging markets like China are starting to get noticed.

What is the current trend? Where does the future lie?

The videogame market is very cyclical. Right now all the attention and focus is going to the console market. But I truly believe in the future of PC gaming and think it’s due for another renaissance and that the market size will begin to grow again. Looking ahead we will see more and more cross-platform development with games being created to interact with each other from machine to machine.

I also see in-game advertising finally starting to reach a point of maturity and new revenue streams will naturally grow out of that. In terms of development trends, the big one is outsourcing. With next generation hardware driving up the costs of production, almost every large publishing company has started to look for ways of reducing their development budgets. In fact current estimates put the size of the global outsourcing business for videogames at $2.5 billion in the next three years.

How is the Indian gaming market shaping up?

The market for gaming in India is still in it infancy, but we hear of tremendous growth in consumer PC sales. I think the last figure we saw was a 20 per cent increase in home PC penetration in India. The critical point here is that videogame consoles are not positioned properly to succeed in the India market, at least not right now. I believe it’s a tough sell convincing Indian consumers that spending $300-500 on a videogame machine makes sense.

 By contrast a PC has a much better chance of gaining traction due to its wide functionality. In terms of skilled professionals, what we are finding is that there is a lot of raw talent, but not a lot of experience. So many of the artists that we interview are incredibly gifted but have never developed a videogame before. In order to solve this problem, we have decided to launch our own internal training program and facility. This will allow us to train new people in the production methods that are standard to the gaming industry.

What is the size of the US gaming industry?

In 2005, the US videogame market was roughly $8.5 billion and conservative estimates put it at around $13 billion by 2010. While the growth rate is relatively lower as compared to Asia, it’s one of the more mature markets. It will be interesting to see these numbers change as more US consumers begin to upgrade their videogame consoles to one of the next generation platforms.

© CyberMedia News