Two Indonesian video game start-ups, Maentrus Digital Lab and Nightspade, were among 30 developers from developing countries invited to attend the 2019 Indie Games Accelerator (IGA), a six-month gaming design program held by Google at its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore.

The chief technology officer of Maentrus, Reza Febri Nanda, said after joining the program in July that he learned about how to more effectively develop independent games.

For the Indonesian participants of IGA, such a program was important because, more than just improving technical abilities, it also worked on marketing skills, Nanda said. Unlike those from developed countries that had legal support from the government and major publishers to produce and distribute games, Indonesian gaming companies still relied on training programs such as IGA to develop, he said.

“By joining programs like IGA, we can meet not only fellow developers from other countries with similar struggles to share but also professionals from around the world who give us tremendous input to effectively set our focus on the target consumers,” Nanda told The Jakarta Post during a media visit at Google’s Asia-Pacific headquarters on Dec. 12.

IGA was started in 2018 to help top gaming start-ups from emerging markets in Asia-Pacific countries. Meanwhile, the second run of the program in 2019 opened to producers and talents from Latin America.

Besides Indonesia, participants of the 2019 IGA came from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, India, Jordan, Malaysia, Mexico, Paraguay, the Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, Uruguay and Vietnam.

The participants were selected out of 1,700 applicants and joined a one-week boot camp in July, before returning to their respective countries for training and later graduating from the program in December.

Through a comprehensive curriculum and personalized mentorships, developers were encouraged to scale and improve their game designs and entrepreneurship skills to achieve full market potential on Google Play.

Nanda said Maentrus, which had been operating since 2015 based in Jakarta, had made some improvements since IGA, especially in terms of efficiency as now the company could develop a game much faster and better handle many projects at once.

Maentrus’ popular online spinning top game, Gyro Buster, had 5 million downloads on Google Play. After IGA input was put into practice, Nanda said, the game’s retention rate went up 5 percent and had continued to strengthen.

Another start-up gaming company from Indonesia at the 2019 IGA was Nightspade from Bandung, West Java, which has spawned a variety of flash mobile games since 2011 including its flagship Viking Fortress.

Chief executive officer Garibaldy Wibowo Mukti said that although Nightspade had seen success in the game development industry with many business-to-business projects handled for both the public and private sectors, IGA still contributed a lot toward the game studio’s improvement.

“It turns out that experience does not justify competence in this business. We found there were lots of things to improve, including adjusting the size of the application and specifying the types of games favored by the Indonesian community,” said Garibaldy.

“Indonesia is a big market for the gaming industry, but the most popular video games are those produced by foreign game developers. With many young developers learning abroad, we can slowly become the market leader in our own country.”

Google Play business development manager Vineet Tanwar said that IGA targeted Southeast Asia and Latin America as the two regions were near the top of the chart in terms of number of gamers with 252 million gamers in Southeast Asia and 187 million gamers in Latin America last year.

“Aside from discovering the best talent from around the world and building mentorship networks that can outlive the projects, Google also offered a mix of short- and long-term rewards to ensure success,” Tanwar said.

IGA participants had the opportunity to showcase their products on Google Play and received US$20,000 in Google Cloud Platform and Firebase credits, a Google Pixel phone for product testing and invitations to exclusive events for top apps and game developers.

Tanwar added that, for the game studios to achieve full potential in both developing a game and building a gaming company, IGA also packed an extensive leadership program to help the start-up developers better manage their teams.

The director of Google Play business development, Kunal Soni, said mobile gaming industry revenues in 2019 reached a total of $2.2 billion in Latin America and $3.2 billion in Southeast Asia, with projected increases of $3.5 billion and $6.1 billion respectively in 2020.

“Meanwhile, in the 2019 global market, mobile gaming revenues totaled $55 billion,” he said. “It has grown along with the development of product features on Google Play including custom listing pages, preregistration rewards and Google Play Instant.”

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