"The one biggest factor limiting growth of the industry in Australia is lack of access to capital," explains Infograms Lancman. "It doesn't matter how good you are, an Australian developer has to go overseas to attract funds. If that money were available locally developers could build a game first and then sell it, and more importantly keep the IP in Australia."
One of the stated aims of the GDAA is to lobby government to attract attention to the sector appears to have paid off in Victoria, with the state government taking steps to support the industry at the state level, however as yet there is no such Federal approach.
As one of the few companies which has managed to attract local investment DeMargheriti says venture capital is not necessarily the kind of money the sector should be looking at courting.
-Venture capitalists are looking for a really high rate of return, and they are not necessarily in for the long haul of developing a company," DeMargheriti says. -We are now looking at creating our own venture capital in the form of a development fund, we've raised about eight million so far and are looking at funnelling it into the development space."
On the flip side of the development funds coin comes the risk associated with an industry largely dependent on the whims of the hardware developers. Evolution's Green points out that work put in to developing the drivers for new hardware platforms can be lost almost overnight when console vendors announce new release dates.
-As soon as the PlayStation 2 was announced no one wanted to know about PlayStation games anymore, and now that there are greater pricing pressures that side of the industry is changing more rapidly," Green says.
Like much of the IT industry games developers also have to contend with the difficulties associated with finding and keeping good staff. Green says it is common to loose animators to film studios, where the financial rewards are often greater. However, the ebb and flow of programmers is slowed by the different requirements in each sector.
-It takes a good six months for a traditional business software programmer to get used to this environment," Green said. -There are a lot more restrictions on things like memory that they are not used to working with."
And while games software developers may face an uphill battle in this country when it comes to convincing investors of the industry's merits SSG's Whiley has been around for long enough to know which tail is really wagging the dog.
-The business side of things is always going to be hard, like any industry we should be looking at developing lasting product and brand recognition so as to minimise the risk to the publishers," Whiley says. -But games have always been at the forefront of development, whether or not it is recognised by the rest of the industry."
He points to the way in which games have influenced the development of the PC, attributing sound cards, CD ROMs, 3D graphics chips, and even increased RAM capacity to the thirst for an ever more thrilling game experience.
-At least half of the hardware innovations that have gone into the PC were derived from improvements in games technology," Whiley said. -Because as soon as anyone got their hands on the first IBM PC they wanted to play games on it, the very fact that CPUs are as powerful as they are today is the result of games."
