Guest Lecturer - Ben Ward

Our guest lecture this week was presented by Ben Ward, who is the founder of a company called ‘Supergonk’. The company’s main platform for games is handheld devices such as mobile phones and tablets, they have released games on platforms such as; Android, Windows Phone and iOS.

In the lecture Ben mainly talked about the creation of games studios, this was a personal subject for him to present as it is something he has experienced as he has created two studios himself, Hogrocket and Supergonk.

On the subject of creating your own company, Ben talked about a lot of things I had no idea about. One of the main points he was putting across was bout piracy in the games industry, and how much it affects indie developers and their companies. Ben talked about his experiences with piracy; he explained that because he is a mobile game developer he sees it a lot. He talked about one incident where he noticed that one of his games on the Android market had over 100,000 downloads but once he went into further research he found out that his app had only been purchased around 200 times and the other remaining downloads had all been pirated.

I didn’t realise that piracy on the app market was that bad, I had some idea but not to that extent, through further research on the internet I discovered that this has been happening for years. I read an article on gamesindustry.biz that talked about app developers facing major problems with piracy and profitability. It showed that out of all of the app developers 69% where game developers and out of that 26% of them had reported piracy with their apps. Through all this piracy the developers have a hard time making a profit which inevitably leads indie companies running out of money and going out of business.

References:

James Brightman. (2013). App devs facing major problems with piracy, profitability . Available: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-09-23-app-devs-facing-major-problems-with-piracy-profitability. Last accessed 8th May 2015.