The Game Industry of South Africa | Hacker News Reader

The Game Industry of South Africa

polygon.com

76 pointsImpossible38 comments

I live in Cape Town, South Africa (I am South African), and realized at an early stage, as a gaming enthusiast, that to get into game dev in this country you need to start your own thing. I couldn't afford to do that so just ended up in a tech/dev role in the fintech industry.

There is so much talent and drive in the youth of SA (and a significant gaming market, that is mostly ignored by the likes of EA, we don't get any servers down here :/ ), that has not been jaded yet. I am convinced it wont be long till lots of really awesome game studios start popping up...

I am not sure what I am trying to get at here... Maybe that I want your money to start a game studio.

Howzit bru.

I work at a tech startup in Cape Town (in the data analysis & visualization space.)

In my experience the challenge is that the local market isn't supportive or capable of supporting in some cases, and breaking into the international market with the weak rand is a tough nut to crack when your competitors all have several hundred mil in investment (x 17 for the exchange rate.)

So you sit with a product that fits locally, has some international potential but you can't really get enough sales locally to support an international launch and you kind of end up seeing the end of the runway whilst realizing that you're unlikely to have enough lift to get airborne by the time you reach it.

I'm sure that with enough funding this isn't as much of an embuggerance.

Any investors want to take advantage of the weak Rand? We have good devs and designers here, we speak English and we can get a lot done for about a 20th of what it would cost in the US...

Lekker man!

This is a much better analysis of the current environment I would say.

Broforce did a lot better than I was expecting it to to be honest. I think I have just become jaded that SA wont ever have any successful game dev stories, so when I watched the trailers etc my mind automatically (and wrongfully so) just flips over to "Oh that looks cool, pity it will never make them any money."

Maybe I should change that perception...

Could the relative weakness of ZAR be a benefit for international investors? If I'm an American making an investment and I was offered identical investment opportunities in 2011 and today, the investment I make today is at a ~50% discount

We just have to figure out how to take advantage. I think the IT industry is better placed than any other given that we're not trying to build using imported materials (or at least, we can charge a lot more than the cost of our imported computers).

Someone should fly to Notch's fancy offices in Stockholm and convince him distribution channels are way more interesting than his next demo.

Another Capetonian checking in, you should go to all the events they mention in the article. I've been to a few and they're great. Make some prototypes, make some games and hopefully the rest will follow!

Nice! I must say we live in the most beautiful city in the world... Maybe I should attend them.

I am quite busy at the moment working part time consulting, and trying to get my own thing off the ground, however I was working with a friend to try and get a game out. We had to put it on hold for now but he continued work on something else for a while:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opvWgUdwBVg

Think he made that in UE and Blender for the bear modeling. Pretty neat.

Neat indeed! I really like the ominous vibe given off by the purple environment.

Also from Cape Town, we build mobile products (apps are part of what we do). One of our first products was a mobile game (don't want to spam it here, PM me if you want a link), and we've built many products for both local and international markets since. We learnt a few things from it: - The SA market is much too small to make a return on the investment. - The international market is difficult to get into from South Africa. Marketing a game to the point where it makes a good return is expensive, even more so from SA.

There are many people in Cape Town building games though, have a look at http://makegamessa.com/

If working with us sounds more interesting than a typical fintech job, let me know and we can chat.

The best game to ever come out of South Africa is called "Grand Theft Country". Absolutely brilliant game. The aim of the game is to become President of the country with a few sub quests along the way:

- Build a mansion/estate for a few million. Special side quest: include an enormous swimming pool with the stated aim of it being used as a backup fire hydrant

- Buy a new Presidents jet for a few billion

- Go on trial (and exonerated, of course) for rape and have unprotected sex with someone that is HIV positive. Special side quest: claim that having a shower afterwards would protect you from contracting HIV

- Marry (at least) 6 women and garner a few mistresses along the way too

- Preside over widespread institutional corruption. Special side question: actually go on trial for bribery and corruption charges (and be exonerated of course)

- Devalue the currency as much as possible in the shortest possible time

- Cause ongoing power outages in the economic hub of the country on a regular basis

The game is built in a perpetual universe and the first of many expansion packs is due for release soon.

The Gupta expansion pack is amazing.

Hahaha, for someone who doesn't ever laugh out loud, this made me lol.

I thought you were serious, and now I'm sad that it doesn't actually exist

It is with much regret that I have to inform you that it does indeed exist and its being played out as we speak :(

Sounds like an interesting game. You'll love the game the country just north of you made.

That was the prototype demo. Once enough investors were fleeced, the Real Thing was built.

I heard that this game also comes with a free oneway ticket to Australia.

Indeed. But an odd title for a sequel to "Grand Theft Continent" - the one where you build a ship, sail for a few months, then exploit a continent, ship its natural resources home, and force the local people into slavery.

(don't think I am trying to undermine the seriousness of our problems now, but we can do better than pretending they started in 2009)

Not sure if we're talking about the same game. I've seen one advertised, apparently there's some cheats that allow you to 'buy' politicians. If on PC, you have to type GUPTA a few times for it to work ...

Interesting article, though I wonder about Ruan's struggles with gated roads, both Waze and Google Maps work well. I stay 5 minutes from Northgate btw.

My first association with South Africa gamedev is great tutorials for computer graphics by Denthor of ASPHYXIA [1]

It was one of the few free resources on this subject I could find at the time, and I am forever grateful.

[1] http://archive.gamedev.net/archive/reference/articles/articl...

Oh yes, those were amazing. This and then later on Nehe's opengpl tutorial introduced me to graphic programing.

I think many people (myself included) spent ages recreating Nehe's rotating cubes and then calling it a day. It was fun, but looking back I wish there were more sources for learning actual game design.

Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure there were. I probably just wasn't looking in the right places.

> Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure there were. I probably just wasn't looking in the right places.

I don't know. I think a lot of us take for granted the amount of high-quality digitized information that's network accessible now.

Before book scanners, before digital publishing, I remember everything on the internet having to have been created specifically for the internet. Remember the "amazing" early digital scanner / cameras? I remember seeing my first scan (I think it was of a wine bottle label, oddly enough) and thinking "Wow, that's something from the real world!"

Oh yeah, these were great times! I found the ASPHYXIA tutorials on some of the CD-ROMs we were sharing (pre-internet age for me, and burning CDs was expensive). I always wanted to thank Denthor for this great tutorials, but all I had was his email address in those tutorials:

    smith9@batis.bis.und.ac.za

This address doesn't exist anymore. It didn't even work at the time I worked through those tutorials. So I never got a chance to thank him and all those other people who were writing all those great tutorials.

BTW, it is too bad that the contained ANSI art is displayed in the wrong character set on all those websites who are mirroring those old tutorials. It should be the old DOS character set, but the browsers show that as LATIN-1 or similar.

Awesome! I totally remember these as well. Such a trip down memory lane.

"with some residents affluent enough to have time to spare to sit around asking existential questions"

Since when does it require affluence? People did this a lot during the collapse of USSR and at that time the usual monthly wage was $20.

This company was recently determined to be one of the best tech companies in South Africa to work for:

http://www.derivco.com/

http://mybroadband.co.za/news/business/145115-what-its-like-...

Derivco uses extremely underhand tactics to promote their image as a tech and game dev company that is pushing boundaries and building exciting things. Actually all they do is build small variants of the same online gambling games using a Microsoft stack. My broadband is not that much better with their "affiliate" articles which various companies pay them to publish and are just advertising.

MyBroadband is a joke. Anyone who takes their news articles seriously probably also reads the Daily Sun religiously.

Although they are a fantastic company (often seen as the Google of South Africa in terms of work conditions), calling them a "gaming" company (as they do themselves) is perhaps not as accurate as calling them a "gambling games" company. Since that is what they do - gambling software.

I remember there used to be a very interesting e-magazine about game programming in South Africa with Pascal (Turbo, Delphi, Free, Quick, ...).

Currently behind a corporate firewall so cannot search for it.

My first ever language was Pascal in grade 6... Singing birthday cake.

Working from home for foreign clients I'm a bit cut off from the rest of the industry - and I don't work with games. Does the gaming industry have the same white/male slant that the rest of the industry does?

Is there any reason to hope that the game industry being on the margins and outside the old corporate structures that will appeal more to young black South Africans?

Not sure what the requirements were to be "South Africa’s first dedicated game design program", but there is Friends of Design in Cape Town:

http://friendsofdesign.net/

Im from Durban, South Africa, are there any cool start ups in SA on the rise that shuld be taken noticed off?

Fellow Durbanite! First one I've spotted on HN. Unfortunately Durbs is a bit sparse on the startup scene (at least using the HN definition of startups - ones with a single focus). We're a small general dev shop, busy also busy collaborating with another local company, working together on an elearning solution. Watch this space!

> Correction: This story originally featured photographs of Cape Town labeled as Johannesburg. We regret the error.

Classic.

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