During the introductory keynote address of the Unite 11 conference which was held in San Francisco this week, it was revealed that Melbourne is the fifth highest ranked city in the world using Unity based on the number sessions per month they've tracked of developers using their popular game authoring tool.
The top four cities are Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai and Nei Hu, with Los Angeles surprisingly the only American city to make it in the top ten. Unity Technologies' general manager of Asia, John Goodale, has spoken about how rampant piracy has helped Unity expand into the Chinese games development industry, and while they see no real solution to combating piracy in general, they concede that it does open up some opportunities. From Gamesindustry.biz...
(Goodale) "Piracy can be a way to seed a market. Nobody will ever fully conquer the piracy problem, but we can certainly turn it to our advantage, and I think that's what we've done in China.
It's pretty phenomenal. I'm certainly not surprised because I've been doing business in Asia for 20 years, but I think the general public will be surprised because we're not known as an engine for Asia."
For the full report, head on over to Gamesindustry.biz (login required) at the following link. Thanks to Ben Britten for the news!
Fantastic to see Melbourne Up
Fantastic to see Melbourne Up there, It displays Melbourne is a leading city of Mobile/Indie Development. This also means that the State government should kick in some support to rebuild Melbourne games industry to that of Montreal. Really there is Billions of dollars in Gaming, it seems logical that the government could tap in and reap the rewards like Canada were 100s of millions of dollars is being generated by there tax breaks.