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IF YOU WERE asked to name as many gaming companies there are in both Ireland and Northern Ireland, how far would you get?
Outside the big players like EA Bioware, Activision Blizzard and Zynga setting up offices here, and middleware companies like Havok and Demonware, there are many independent game studios not only in Dublin, but dotted across Ireland and Northern Ireland.
The history of the Irish games industry goes back much further than you would initially expect. For one, hands up how many people knew that Atari opened up a plant in Tipperary in 1979, where it manufactured 2,000 cabinets a month for games like Gauntlet and Marble Madness until 1998?
Or that one of the earliest known games studios, Emerald Software, was based in Waterford (it was founded in 1988 and made ports of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker for the Commodore 64 and MSX among other 8-bit platforms before shutting down in 1991)?
The game development industry in Ireland is slowly growing in size and has been around longer than you might think. Yet despite the long heritage, it hasn’t really been clear what shape the industry currently is or exactly how many development studios there are.
It’s something that Jamie McCormick, who has been actively involved in the games industry in Ireland since the 90s and current venture is Scraggly Dog Games, is trying to change.
His latest project, GetIrishGames.ie, aims to shine a spotlight on the growing Irish games industry, and part of that project involves mapping the industry from past to present.
While the mapping project itself is in its third year, it was really 2001 where it all began. Dr. Aphra Kerr, currently a senior lecturer of sociology at NUI Maynooth put together a project called ‘From Traditional Visual Media to Contemporary Digital Media: The Emergence of Digital Games‘.
From there, she and a few others within the industry founded gamedevelopers.ie, a service dedicated to supporting local companies, indie developers and freelancers in the industry. Part of that work involved compiling reports to show how the industry was progressing, the first was released in 2009 while the second was in 2012.
After McCormick put together the second report, he decided to take on the task of mapping the entire gaming industry in both Ireland and Northern Ireland, providing a clear view of the sector.
It’s still very much a work in progress, but acquiring the information for all the companies – relying on public records as well as getting help from Ordinance Survey Ireland, Enterprise Ireland, and gamedevelopers.ie among others – took a significant amount of time to compile.
One of the main problems facing games development here was the lack of data about the industry. Since the Clustering Development Team, a group dedicated to increasing the number of digital jobs in Ireland, was created in 2012, it had been relying on old data which isn’t preferable when recommending new policies.
For the first time, they all have the same information so they could agree on something, and the second thing that they said to me is when the government makes a policy decision… they make that decision that’s based on data that’s two to three years out of date and when they do make it, it’s another two or three years before they can see the impact.Between the map and the timeline, we have a real view of the gaming industry.
Identifying the companies is only the first part of the task, with classification, more in-depth categorisations (currently a significant number of entries on the map have either hardhats or question marks companies) and profiles have yet to be compiled.
But what’s there already offers enough for those both in Ireland and abroad to understand how developed the industry is. Those looking at moving here can see what other companies are in the area so if their original plan doesn’t work out, they can have a backup, while those studying game design can see what opportunities there are.
McCormick is currently working on the project by himself, but is open to extra help and donations to the project.
While its primary aim is to help those in the industry, as well as those working abroad, understand the shape the industry is in, it’s also hopes to raise the profile of the local games industry among the general public.
While there are gaming events held regularly, McCormick says they’re more about “connecting developers with developers, whereas what we need to do is connect consumers with the games.”
But it also extends much further than that. Ireland sees €240 million spent on games and his aim is to see one per cent of that market (€2.4 million) going towards homegrown companies and developers. The obvious caveat is the games have to be good before people would buy them, but McCormick feels that if the project works, it will mean more traffic to the site, and hopefully more Irish games will be purchased.
For now, the focus is on raising funds for the project through on-site donations and events, with the possibility to apply for EU funding later on this year, to help speed up the project. Regardless of what happens, McCormick intends on finishing it and jokes “I’m at the point of no return, but what can you do?”
Those interested in helping out or donating to the project can find out more details here.
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This is one area the government should be targeting both educationally and attracting more companies like that here.
Forget about attracting big studios I’d rather they just supported what we have and new ones looking to start up. Its impossible get funding unless you’re looking to make some freemium mobile candy-crushesque bullshit
The Government gave up on indigenous industry in 1958 and never looked back. It’s all about quick job creation and you create jobs fastest with foreign direct investment than you do developing an industry.
There is no place for innovation in Ireland.
Personally I think the Games Development Industry is one of the worst areas to target in any way by the Government, whether by any sort of direct funding or supporting education in this area.
Its’ one of the riskiest industries I can think of, particularly for new companies. Even if your game is generally a lot of fun and good value, as long as you’re a no name studio and you take the actions to mitigate that disadvantage you can fail miserably.
And don’t get me started on the large Studios, they’ll buy out a small studio and eventually close it down and consolidate their jobs into their larger multi-national offices.
In the case of Software Engineers, bite the bullet and work for any other software developer than a games developer, it may not seem as fun but tough, a job can’t always be fun.
Games Developers have too much difficulty calculating the return of a product compared to all other types of software developing companies, this means they make a habit of dropping staff if things go pear shaped, there’s nothing else they can do.
Sorry, second paragraph should say “… and you DON’T take the actions to mitigate…”
The game industry is only going to get bigger and the government should consider grants to some of these Irish companies. It’s just that a lot of older people don’t take this industry seriously and don’t know that it makes a hell of a lot of money.
The current EI grant system is utterly ludicrous. Extremely limited in scope, requires a private investor to get involved and the government take a stake in the company in exchange for funding. Under those conditions there will never be a big gaming company born in Ireland.
Bit blank round Cavan monaghan rosscommon Leitrim. But shur theses counties don’t exist round the cabinet table.
You can’t expect them to put companies where people don’t want to live.
@Rasher I wasn’t aware that Ministers doubled as game developers and had a monopoly on the activity. #CabinetCrush
Yup. They’re everywhere!
I wonder if there was some kind of digital equivalent of the Guaranteed Irish logo would it raise awareness of irish software, webservices and other digital media companies. The problem is small game developers come and go over a course of a few years. They may have a good release and trade well for a while but then the market disappears and they have to shut up shop. Then we come back to the same problem every potential entrepreneur in Ireland faces, the consequences of a business failure are far too high. They follow you for years. Yes there needs to be consequences of a sort to stop fly by night jobs who set up business today and disappear tomorrow but if you want people to get into this industry in the first place they can’t be going in terrified of failure and how it’ll destroy their lives. Maybe there should be a strike system, one failure you pay up as best you can, come out of receivership/bankruptcy or whatever after 2yrs (just a number pulled out of the air for an example), second failure 5yrs, third failure banned from running a company for 15yrs. That way people aren’t completely scared out of trying.
Worst map ever.
Beard
Game development in ireland is a joke, i went about making games with irish developers but if you dont go to college and study games development they wont give you the time of day, i was forced to look else where and co-founded Octagon Games with an international crew, we released our first game this year and won 2 awards on windows phone and made a profit of $30,000 to date, and thats less than 3 months after release, heres my game and its still growing https://www.facebook.com/OctagongamesIMarble
If you want to entrer in the gaiming industry as a game tester, go con my blog to gain all the information:
thegametester.com
They show the wrong DIT college for game design :s
This probably only irritated me because I’m in dit.
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