Games-only fund would help SMEs with leg up in lucrative gaming market: Oceanus

Barriers to entry into the lucrative games market are significant, especially for a company outside the major Canadian centres, but Ottawa’s Oceanus Communications has overcome these obstacles and scored an important publishing deal with Sega.com for its multiplayer online game Legacy Online. Lora Ricci, VP of operations at Oceanus, tells Canadian NEW MEDIA that having a working product was key to winning the publishing deal after a recent trip to the important Electronic Entertainment Exposition (E3) in Los Angeles. The agreement sees Legacy Online published on the Sega.com site starting July 14 and available on a subscription basis for $9.95 per month. The game will be the first launched under Sega’s new online developer program, which provides assistance with production, hosting, authentication and billing, quality assurance, customer support and frontline marketing services for games including Legacy. Ricci says working in partnership with a large publisher such as Sega involves a revenue trade-off but one that’s well worth it as the company’s new partner can reach a far wider audience with its well-known brand name. Guerilla marketing, she says, can’t possibly have the same reach. Oceanus financed pre-development and development itself out of revenues derived from fee-for-service web work, including web content designed for Parks Canada. Telefilm Canada chipped in with production funding from the Canada New Media Fund (CNMF). Ricci says the funding win came despite the company having an Ottawa address. Familiar with the various government assistance programs available to new media players in Canada, she says working in the nation’s capital can be a challenge since the funding agencies are located in Toronto and Montreal. Face-to-face meetings with industry peers and funding agency staff are crucial to winning project support, she says, adding that "Ottawa kind of gets forgotten…Everyone just assumes we’re just fine. It’s a false perception." While Canadian Heritage is headquartered in the capital, travel to Montreal or Toronto is necessary to win face time with funding agency officials, Ricci says. Ricci, who took advantage of Ontario Media Development Corporation (OMDC) funding to take part in the recent digital trade mission to LA for E3 (CNM, March 21/03), says the government should take a close look at establishing a games-specific fund to help companies such as hers. She doesn’t buy the argument that games aren’t a cultural endeavour. "It’s a snobbish thing to say. Shakespeare was for the masses, he wasn’t culture in his day." Games, she says, contain a strong creative element and the Canadian content is built in to strategy games such as Legacy and other role-playing games popular online. "It’s de facto . Why do we have to prove it?" she asks of current funding guidelines that explicitly seek Canadian story elements in winning projects. "Read between the lines. They’re proving that we’re different from the Americans. Can we please stop comparing ourselves to the Americans?" As to how a games-specific funding envelope would be structured, Ricci says it would have much shorter cycles than current programs designed for other forms of new media, and would offer greater financial assistance than the current CNMF - necessary due to production budgets than can range from $1.5-$2 million for games such as Legacy. A games fund could also make other new media funding envelopes easier to administer, she argues. "To say that a game is the same as a web site - it’s making Telefilm’s life difficult, I would imagine." Ricci says the potential exists for even more small companies to join the fray with the right funding available. She says that will be especially true as the current trend toward tie-in games with popular entertainment titles is reversed when savvy gamers stop "buying into the hype."

Games-only fund would help SMEs with leg up in lucrative gaming market: Oceanus

News | 06/25/2003 4:00 am EDT

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