7 - Game Studios in Southeast Asia : From Outsourced to Culturally Customized Games
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
In this chapter I conduct a regional tour of Southeast Asian game studios. Nations like Thailand have adopted primarily an outsourcing approach to game development, in the hopes of building up skillsets that could later be applied to locally developed games. Other developers located in Malaysia have focused on developing educational games, relying on a Tiger economic formula of cooperative state, industry, and educational alliances. Paradoxically, nations that are relatively more impoverished like Indonesia and Cambodia have developed original games drawn from their own local cultural fabric. Intended as a potential source of South to South game innovation. this chapter also investigates when developers opt to globalize for publics abroad, and when they design for more local players.
Keywords: Southeast Asia, Game Industry, globalization, culture, casual and mobile game development
Unlike the mobile games played in Brazil discussed in Chapter Three, whose publishers and developers mostly hail from the global North, a growing number of nations in Southeast Asia are home to local game studios and independent developers. As Taiwanese, Hong Kong based media scholar Peichi Chung writes of such smaller game companies in her analysis of Singaporean and South Korean game industries, ‘In creative industries, government, small media firms and creative talent become emerging actors in the new media production system’ (60). To what degree do these developers incorporate their own cultures and values into their productions? Do they primarily make these games for their own countrypersons, or are they intended to be globalized products for global players? And how does the so-called ‘Asian Tiger’ style economics prevalent in much of Southeast Asia, with an emphasis on export industries and educational infrastructure, impact such game production? While embarking on a tour of Southeast Asian game studios, this chapter will shed light on contextual and regional differences between Southeast Asian nations in game development, from Thai studios that mostly do outsourcing and conversions for Northern game developers, to the surprising quantity of game studios located in Indonesia's smaller cities, producing original, casual games in the nation's official Bahasa language.
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- Transnational PlayPiracy, Urban Art, and Mobile Games, pp. 143 - 160Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020