The Resolve of the Latin American Gaming Industry

[Music] hi how are you guys my name is david lucio and i'm here to talk about the resolve of the latin american gaming industry i'm a content creator and filmmaker from panama well actually from colombia i lived in panama for the last 20 something years and i wanted to talk to about something that i've found that i've seen throughout my experience and that i think could help out the the indie dev community in latin america specifically but first i wanted to talk about the name of the talk it's even though it's called the result of the latin america gaming industry i'm really talking about something called gara gara is this concept that we use to compare some soccer teams actually specifically and it's so no there's no one better to actually explain what gara is dantego forland the captain of the uruguayan

team basically it's it's like when you don't have that last breath but you always want to give more and i think there's nothing that encapsulates more the the fire and the status of the actual gaming industry in latin america right now so the actual name of this talk is and it's from the point of view of a passionate gamer and content creator that just really wants to find ways to help so who is this dude so let me introduce myself as i said before my name is david lucio i'm a filmmaker and content creator with a big passion for games um i've been creating content in several platforms for the last six seven years i work with sony um for sony's channel around latin america we have a program that goes to 23 countries and we co-host that with my wife i actually do everything with my wife and you'll see her um appear in several of the of the slides so i'll get there but i'm also just like 35 and i'm going through a midlife crisis while trying to

get in the gaming industry to help develop my regions visibility and opportunities um but i really wanted to talk about why i love games i love games for for something that i think relates to a lot of people in latin america and is that like many i actually learned english through movies and video games um we didn't get localized games in the in the 90s and early 2000s in our regions so most of it was in english so we read a lot um i'm sure i i learned most of my english through final fantasy games and metal gear games and stuff like that and also i'm an immigrant i i flew from colombia when i was seven years old to panama and i had no communities i have no families i had no friends or anything so games actually helped me through that and games gave me a window of opportunity again to meet with new people and and and that aligned with my interests and i also created some enemies because we played a lot of mario kart and mario party in 64. but i digress and then the

third reason is that it eventually led me to content creation um i've always been fascinated with the narrative aspect of games and i've always been doing video stuff specifically with with my wife and my partners with a lot of video content so when the opportunity presented itself to do something with my with my tools to actually pursue something that i was passionate about was amazing and that's when pata coins came into the picture but that going to the first platform i actually created in panama i did it with a couple of friends it ended up being one of the biggest platforms of content in our in our in our country um it was something that started with a couple of friends that just we just met weekly to play dnd games and most of the time we ended up like discussing video games and movies so i wasn't that um i wasn't that big big of a consumer but i wasn't that of a big of a consumer of

like youtube channels and stuff like that so i really didn't know what type of content was out there but i did know that i would love to see the content that we were basically doing with my wife um and our friends so that's where patacoins comes in and um it actually created a lot of opportunities for us because that's when we started covering big events like e3 and paxis we um we saw a podcast where we uh talked to different talents in our region we helped produce the first comic-con in panama by developing some um some talks and some panels one specifically dedicated on how women in in panama specifically are dominating the the content creation side of gaming um we've done a lot of events for to meet our community and to help them thrive in some ways and we've also done events in panama with several sponsors for like for instance that picture down there it's um we did a like a big event in panama for pokemon go when that blew up um and from these

pata coins lasted for like five six years it became really big it was really cool but then my wife and i stephanie and i wanted to try new things so we started lw and that's the thing we're doing right now so it's basically a space where we talk about games movies and everything we're specifically a twitch channel where we try to focus a lot in indie games and we've been trying to um to tell people about wishlisting which is like a term that in latin america we don't really use um so it's it's something that that is has a big importance for us we've been working on this for the past two years and that led me eventually to understand the power and value of community without the community we we ended up growing with we wouldn't be able to do what we're doing right now and i also want to think that when you do have a community you have a responsibility to use your platform for good in some way and the way we're trying to do it is through helping

other artists or other up-and-coming creators who have a platform to jump into um and in that search of community and and and search for for allowing our community to grow and thrive i started thinking about gaming communities and that's the first time i went to a mix and in the mix blew my mind like that was the first time that i came face to face with a lot of indie developers like side by side and talk to them about their experience and everything and what i realized being there is that without me knowing it because we were always trying to look for spanish speaking people in the in the in the dev industry in the game industry to actually interview for our channels but it was really hard for us to find them and in like in an event like uh like mix and another uh small event for indie for new titles we actually met a lot of um dev teams from mexico in argentina colombia uruguay and that blew my mind i understood that searching for latin american games was hard and it shouldn't

be that hard specifically because i think representation really matters and and i'm not talking only about seeing yourself on screen which really is hard for us in latin america like we're talking about at three percent of the characters in games are latino and then from that three percent only five is playable so we do want to see us on screen and there's so much potential from everything from our culture from our heritage from the stories we tell from the backgrounds we come from what we've learned through games like for instance this is a a great example of a game called crystals which were developed in colombia um for most people they see the picture on the right and they they think okay this is this game has great visuals and and and and lore and world design and that's amazing and it really does the game is amazing but on this on the other side of it us like for me as a colombian watching this was like oh my god i can't believe i'm actually fighting baddies in front of el santuario

that's a place that's really important in my country and seeing yourself seeing yourself is huge and not only being able to relate to a character specifically but relating to a world and to the experience and the color palette and everything um we have something in latin america coming from colombia that's called realism it's like a magical realism where we have found how our culture is so um fused with with with the fantastical and the dreamlike and i think that being captured through games can be fantastic and we are thriving i mean even though i'm going to talk about a lot of struggles that i think the latin american gaming industry is going through i do think that we're thriving through a lot of different experiences like just this group of six games we're talking about crystals that's a turn-based rpg from colombia we have buck fables that's a paper mario type rpg game that comes from that came from panama mulaka is an action adventure game from mexico toonche's a side-scrolling beat him up from peru

aztec forgotten gus just came out and it really explores the aztec culture and the lore behind it and even tremaine it's a puzzle platformer um with a great story that comes from argentina so we're really uh infusing our dna in a lot of genres and i think that can only explode and on top of that the the industry as a whole is really growing and steadily growing year by year you can see how in in pc mobile and console there's growth year by year specifically for instance in the mobile area it's growing almost it's almost doubling itself year on year and i think um well not i think one of the main reasons for this is and that's one of the struggles we're going to talk later on the financial opportunities we have like not a lot of people can actually afford a console or a big-ass pc in our countries so we do have that gadget in your phone we do have a cell phone so a lot of our developers are actually developing experience for mobile that are doing really good and that's one way that indie games can

actually get in the hands of latin american consumers and the other cool thing about it is that that has led to a growth also on the content creation side like just last year the past two years we've seen how our content creators are breaking record are breaking audience records all around the world just the graph i know he's from spain and we're talking about 2.4 million people watching him but i think that the important information to get out of this is that that's the market that's out there that's the the size of the audience that's looking for spanish um led content it's huge um and and that's also something that will relate eventually to something that i think it's really important for for for indie devs and it's watching or seeing south latin america as a really really big audience for opportunity for audiences like i was telling just that twitch grew twice almost in all of our countries in the last couple of years during the

pandemic um but even though all of that is growing even though the the the consumer side is growing even though the industry as a whole is growing even though the content creator opportunities are really really thriving and we're actually developing a lot of uh games in the last couple of years we do go through a lot of struggles and i think you can you can you can sum them down to five the first one is education um most of our countries don't have real careers behind game development or animation or programming or anything like that that's based basically in the sense that the industry of games is not really recognized as an industry still in most of our countries and the ones that do are starting at are are starting to create projects and and scholarships and stuff but it's not a big thing so actually for people in our country in our regions in our region like that to actually get a good education and start developing games is really hard the other one is visibility like i was telling you um finding our games is hard

we do have to go to an event in person and just skin through and find people and talk to them and that's a great way to actually meet a network around but it's a tough place to be in as an industry if you have to actually go to these types of shows to find you not only finding a game but actually finding out they are latin america we also have problems with tech um i was watching a talk yesterday and and and they were talking about how because of visa restrictions and financial restrictions and everything a lot of teams from mexico argentina and colombia and big countries have been just like really putting their def kits in their bags and bringing them over like just having access to the tech is really hard financing again i think this has come several times not only from the consumer side it's tough but also most of the arts in our countries have been have developed in the last couple of years because of support from governmental um uh initiatives so let's say like the

film industry in panama or colombia we have a law that states that the government through their cultural um branch has to actually donate money or help finance and bootstrap projects in film and that has helped actually the film industry to thrive we need this and we're getting some of this in some of our countries but that's literally something that we depend on so it all goes down to crowdfunding and stuff and i'm going to talk about some struggle that crowdfunding has too and then finally localization and this is something that has been part of the industry for a while now and not only thinking about the way people can consume games because we're not a bilingual region at all um not only how consumers consume games but also for deaf teams it's an additional expense that we have to think to to actually publish a game so we all of these combined are big obstacles for us and how do i think we can battle this or at least what i found in my years creating content and trying to create communities

and stuff i think this is the biggest takeaway of all or at least what i've gotten from the gaming industry in the last couple of years and that's collaboration it is a fragment of the industry that depends on collaboration to actually keep going through so i'm going to share some examples of stuff we've done with our communities and our platforms here in panama to actually help on the aspects that i think might need help through collaborating the first one is finding points of collaboration between development development teams and communities or content creators for instance this is a game by world either games it's a game called beater street birthday it's a boss battle rpg type game and they were looking to crowdfund it wasn't um it wasn't actually going steadily so we i'm sorry we began a campaign where we gave the game that one of the boss fights to a lot of content creators in panama and they started streaming it through a challenge that was called the bitter sweet challenge and it was to see how many tries it got them to actually

beat the boss and that spread the word and they got their game funded like in that weekend so those types of collaborations are really good for our games also collaborating between devs and i know there's a lot of communities already in social networks that i'm going to talk to you later on that actually help in this way but also like just small teams just network and find other teams and find ways to collaborate like we are um throughout an event that we do it's called twitchella that i'm gonna talk to you about um in a in a further slide um one of the things we're trying to do is create opportunities for academia and for people to actually go and learn stuff um so doing this and creating windows again where devs can collaborate with devs and talk um and and share ideas it's really helpful like for instance when we did this panel we had like a 30 minute cool off before the the chat and they were just talking about how they were working and one of them was having issues in the moment getting their money from one of the crowdfunding sites because they were in panama they

couldn't get a um an account number to get it and and then the jeff from colombia tell them how they did so like only getting those spaces where you can actually exchange information is great and if you can add that on top of like an event where you can actually reach bigger communities and maybe help um um what's that what's the word i'm looking for help uh inspire new up and coming challenge that's a talent i mean that's amazing and also collaboration between content creators like we as content creators have to understand that we are part of the gaming industry as a whole and um our gaming industry is going to thrive even more when we understand that we have to help out um but also helping each other out because that way we can all grow um like for instance we do a lot of events in panama like even though we have a social media platform and we do have the twitch channel for us one of the main focuses of our platform is to constantly create opportunities to collaborate with other content creators

not only for the idea of bringing new audiences but also i am hopefully give a give up platform for our platform for up and coming small creators that can use our platform to actually get to a bigger audience and also understand that even though we are part of the gaming industry and we're like a soup niche of the gaming industry of the latin american gaming industry if we can open our doors and collaborate outside of our borders it's amazing one of the things i've learned specifically from the indie game dev community is that everyone's really nice and everyone's constantly looking for opportunities to collaborate or help or inspire and so i think looking through through roads to actually collaborate with other indie devs that might not be from our regions might be a great opportunity so that takes me to twitchella to challenge the event i was telling you about futura is a nonprofit charity streaming fest that we organized from panama we do it at least two or three times a

year um we raise funds that it has like a couple of pillars that are actually what we want the event to succeed in one of them it's of course the charity part of it and we've been working with unicef for the past couple of years so we raised up most of our funds to help underprivileged children in our country in your region the other aspect of it is to actually be a platform for new content creators like we have different sizes of content creators but we're always trying to have a couple at least per day that are up and coming that are just starting or have small audiences so that they can use the event and the platform and that networking to actually uh show their content to to new audiences and finally create opportunities for education um this is one of the main things that i'm always trying to do and we've had the opportunity like i was saying of collaborating beyond our borders and just knocking in doors and asking for help and we've had a lot of panels where people have actually learned a lot we've been we've had

developed the disarray videos america panel it's it was a talk between jose gracia ricardo and jeff cardenas three of them have are developed developers from latin america from panama and colombia so that gate gave a window for people to actually understand how they're working from latin america what their struggles are um what they have learned and stuff like that we've also had panels with troy baker talking about his career katwensky talking about the um audio design and and composition we've had philippe culliano that worked in in haysliding he takes two and and a way out and he's now developing his own game and he was talking about how how he got how people get scholarships to start to study where he studied and places to actually not knock on doors to get new opportunities melissa of course we have also had her in in the past couple of in in one of the last two cellas to talk about her career and and technical game design so this is stuff that we are doing that i think actually helped but i think

there's something that the wider industry can do to help as well and that's understanding how big of an audience and how great of an onions latin america is for indie not only because of the financial efforts that we have to go through um not a lot of people can actually afford a 70 game so like the price point of indie games tend to be really appealing for people in our region and also it's a big it's a huge ass market like i mean i'm talking about 23 countries and and like i was showing before about just talking about audiences on twitch it's like a big big audience so i think it's a great opportunity for indie games to market themselves in latin america something that's not actually happening and and and see them thrive and actually give also opportunities for people in our country to learn english through your games to make friends through your games and maybe even get inspired to develop their own games and i think there's three things that can be done to actually move this forward or move the needle forward one

is find these windows of collaboration with in the devs in latin america there's a lot of communities i'm gonna share in one of the last slides that you can actually go to unlock your doors and find ways to collaborate also finding communities again those communities are going to be in one of the last slides but but a lot of people in those communities are looking for opportunities to help the in the latin american industry to thrive so there's a good way to actually help and find our games like i was saying it's really hard we battle and we struggle with disability but in these events there's always a guy from mexico or chile or uruguay um trying his best with his english learn through final fantasy to actually find opportunities to collaborate on network so let's just work together to not depend on garage alone we do have gara i think the resolve of the latin american gaming industry is an actual thing um it's a new industry that's thriving even though it has all of those struggles and just by picking a broom and

and and helping out i think the industry is going long ways but i think the industry as a whole can actually help us move the needle forward um so that's my talk um i don't know if anyone has any questions or comments i do want to share a couple of resources um while you think about any questions but basically it's this three small slides the first one is where are we like how can you find us most of our um of that community is based in facebook groups so facebook groups is a great way to start most of our uh um industries actually market through whatsapp because it's the biggest social platform we have but and this is where i think there's a great opportunity to actually be on the lookout a lot of content creators are turning to tiktok in latin america to share what they're doing on their twitch channels and on their youtube videos and stuff like that so if you're looking for content creators and stuff i think this might be the best way to look for them and if you're looking for game devs there's also a great way to look for

them these are other examples of video games in latin america again this is like a really really really really really specific list um i just wanted to share some diversity like with a 2.5 action adventure from drac mastulis mexico called candlelight and we have puzzle platformers and tower defense games flighting sims fighting games puzzle stealth games like there's a lot so just go looking for us specific especially in in small events and look for communities we have communities like indies that just had a talk yesterday so you can look for that in the vault game that's max we have the game from game audio that time that has a talk tomorrow at 10 30 a.m dvjs mexico is a big one women in game x has a talk here i think at 4 p.m on thursday i don't know if it's specifically them but i know there's some people from the game uh women in game x that are part of the talk and finally lighting x in gaming i think is huge and they also have a talk thursday 10 a.m um and these are my socials just in case you want to follow up contact or follow

you can find me and uh twitter and instagram in both david lucius or twitch lappa and lds the future you can look for us on twitch and talk and hang out so yeah that's my talk i don't know if anyone has any questions i have a question david yep and a bit of comments too my my name is daniel i am a puerto rican i was born and raised in new york but over the last two years cultural representation in video games has been the focal point of my work and as an outsider looking in you know i may be a part of the diaspora but i'm not i don't have the same experiences that all of my people have and so for somebody who wants to go indie hopefully one day what would your advice be for me

yeah i hope that i was a little bit clear i think i think that well first of all thank you for for being in the talk and having a question um i actually think and this is something that i applied to what i do and is i think we sometimes underestimate the value of our how we inject our dna onto everything i think latinos coming from puerto rico or coming from la punta argentina are really they're always injecting what they do to their to to what they do and and i'm a big defender on that things don't have to represent everything you do every every time you do it and what i mean by that is like i grew watching spielberg i love how spielberg directed films and i understand that i have a responsibility to maybe show people through my films what a colombian experience is but i also have a lot of sensibility that comes from the movies that i watched so my point of view even though it might be westernized in some ways other than order have been injected with my experience as a colombian and living in

panama and all that stuff so i think that the first thing that anyone in our region that has to do in any creative endeavor is just understand and appreciate how much of their identity they can actually inject in what they're doing even though um at a first glance it might not feel latin enough i don't know if that makes any sense but hope that helped that actually really did help um thank you very much i appreciate it no thank you hi david thank you so much for your talk um i'm working in the in the climate game space and one of the things that we're finding is that we've known for a long time that the global south as a whole uh suffers from climate impacts far more than a lot of countries in the global north um do you know uh how do you see if at all the indie game scene um in south america responding to that do you see them trying to tackle those kinds of issues and games are there any communities that are building up around that do people

need funding information do you know what the the sort of needs or wants are uh related especially to climate-changing games thank you i'm not i'm not that uh thank you what's your name again i'm sorry felix thank you okay um no what i what what i would say is i'm not that um i haven't researched at all on that aspect of games um i do there's a lot of initiatives specifically like from brazil and argentina and mexico of of of um like young people initiatives to actually help with climate change i do know most of the initiatives that are actually supported by supported by governmental funds in a region tend to be academic or related to an initiative from the government so i'm sure that there's points of contact with the government and their own initiatives to actually help out that you can actually find deaf teams and put them in contact with those government facilities to see if there's

opportunities for both of them to collaborate like for instance in panama we um we have a lot of stuff that we're doing because of that canal that kind of basically destroyed part of the forest here in panama so they're constantly at the canal of panama they're looking for ways to actually help out and and spread the word so they've actually contacted animators and and programmers in panama to develop apps and games not only to teach people about the story of of the panama canal but also like do some reparations on the story of like uh minorities and people of color in panama and there's also a part of it that states um about the the conservation how to conserve better some of the found in florida that had learned lost through the canal so i think that those might be a good place to start just like contact the initiatives of the government and maybe dev teams from those countries and find ways for them to collaborate and create stuff that's amazing thank you so much no thank you we've got time for one more

question when i started this my name is sebastian rivera i'm colombian born and raised in the united states but um but you know i come from a little small town and i remember you know announcing to my family of choosing this career it's a very niche market in latin america and south america not many people know about this but it's something that really sees that a lot of latin americans they want to be part of this market and i think you discuss it a little bit about these opportunities are not truly there um any words of advice of like how to let this business grow inside it not only let it be only for indie developers where it's only one person and two people but let this market grow as for european markets asian markets american markets where we could probably see one day that there might be a latin america video game company that stretches out

uh i mean i think i think it i i don't want to be like repetitive whatever what i said before but i really think it goes down to collaboration between our borders um latin america has always thrived in understanding that it's one as latin america most of the biggest initiatives both in music and film and everything that has gone through art in our region have gone from collaboration between countries um i know there's a lot of communities for instance in the one of the last sites like in in these slides that tend to collaborate between different countries and i think before we think about being seen outside of our region we just have to understand that as has happened before with different initiatives um in in our region we have to work together and maybe create a coalition of game devs from different countries like right now i think that mexico argentina and colombia have their own like actual like finance groups

governmental groups that are battling for for opportunities in the game industry department but i think that the only way for the region to understand that industry as an industry is for it to grow from within and i only think that happens through collaboration um i also think that having an in the industry it's almost like i don't know if this is a term that's going to translate well but la cantera like having the the people in the bench when you have like a soccer team you have a couple of people in the bench i think the way that bench works is that it keeps training those people to actually eventually replace this and what has happened with the indie game development community is that when one of the games really shines like for instance crystals and i had a stuck with jeff the last time we we spoke um what happens is then headhunters start looking for the talent within that game and they take them to their bigger teams in europe states or asia so actually having an indie dev community and actually thriving there i think it's a

great starting point it's like when you shoot short films to eventually get financed for their future phone um so even though i understand that eventually the goal would be to grow to a point where i can actually talk beyond latin america i do think that we have to first collaborate within grow within stamp something in the ground and then from there go on and i think that the sky is the limit basically thank you very much thank you so much [Music]