Mobile Core Meeting

This report is written by Joo Yong Chin, organizer of the Mobile Core meeting.



The very first meeting of the IGDA Core meeting (Mobile) was held on 22nd September 2006. The venue was in KLCC's Kinokuniya Cafe and the meeting was kicked off at 8:30pm.

i) Introduction
First off, I personally welcomed everyone to the meeting and I gave them a lowdown on what exactly is this meeting all about. This meeting was conceived to get people who are interested to join or are already in the mobile gaming industry to gather and share information and basically to network amongst each other.

I also gave them a short description of the definition of mobile gaming, mainly involving handheld electronic devices which are capable of networked communications, with this being the scope of the topics being discussed during this and future meetings.

We then moved on to individual introduction. We have people from local developers, telcos, vendors, students and people who are generally interested in the mobile gaming industry. This is a good start to this Core meeting as we have a diverse group of people to work on and we can have various views of the industry from very different angles.

ii) Joining the Mobile Gaming Industry
The second agenda is about how to start or join the mobile industry. I started by giving a short briefing on how exactly one will to go about joining the industry as a J2ME developer, mainly learning the language on your own and doing some short projects and showing them to the local developers. Norman from Ozura added that they are always on the lookout for talents (either developers, graphic artists or sound engineers). Buzz, who is a student in MMU, asked Ozura for a benchmark for acceptable work and Victor from Ozura suggested that the students can actually present their product to them and they will consider marketing the product or not.

From that line of thought, Yann from HELP college asked whether the cap (about RM 8) on download rates for contents (games included) which is set my a government body, is affecting the developers anyway because from what he has heard, the developers are getting minimal revenue cut. Since the current business model for mobile games downloads have to support 3 parties, mainly the developers, the content aggregators and the telcos, Yann said that the developers are not really happy with the profit cut that they are getting. Alan decided to answer the question where he said that his company actually gives higher cuts to products which have higher quality. I asked how was the quality determined, with him asking whether past performances of the product/developer in the international market is part of it. Alan agreed on that and added on that he personally will test the games himself before he decides whether this game will be a hit or a miss and thus what kind of cut the developer and the content aggregator is getting. However, his feelings about any particular game are NOT the sole deciding factor of developer/aggregator cut; Contractual agreements and other business factors also apply. Moreover, revenue share is seldom discussed per individual game, except when there are extenuating circumstances that justify differing from the existing standing contracts between parties.

Victor and Norman from Ozura added that for a mobile games developer to survive and grow, it has to target international level and go for volume. Unfortunately, the current business model does not encourage the growth of a developer based on 1 or 2 product (as a contrast to other types of games developers).

On another issue, Yann said that he was approached before by parties which are interested in bringing in foreign contents to be developed here or to be localised here. Alan commented that the English based market is too competitive and saturated but if the game is localised to Bahasa Malaysia, Tagalog or some other asian language, it will perhaps fare better.

Yann asked about bringing in foreign content (developing for them and/or localised it)
Alan commented English based market is too competitive but if you are to localised to Bahasa, Tagalog or some asian language, it will fare better.

iii) Future Meetings
The meeting moved on to the final agenda which is regarding future meetings and growing the community. Yow Chuan, currently in the finance sector but was one of the pioneers in the Malaysian mobile gaming industry, said that there is currently a focused group on mobile gaming which is called Mobile Monday. They just had their meeting the last few weeks and suggested that we approach them to see whether there can be any collaboration or not.

I brought up the fact that the current venue (Cafe above KLCC's Kinokuniya) is not too suitable if a speaker were to conduct a short talk or somebody have something to present. I decided that a better venue should be found and he decided to approach MDeC on whether they are able to arrange a time slot for us in a meeting room in KL Sentral where it was reported to be a good and condusive place for meetings and talks with facilities.

The next meeting's agenda was decided and one of the topics that should be discussed is the effects of piracy on mobile gaming, which was suggested by Ow from BigBang Interactive. This copy of the meeting's minutes will be posted in the IGDA forums as well as mailed to everybody that was present. I collected the emails from each party.

The meeting was adjourned at 9:45pm and after hours networking session was held at Starbucks and San Francisco Steakhouse.

Chapter Meeting August 24th

For some reason, there was a massive jam around KL leading all the way down to Sg Besi. So quite a number of people were late, and some couldn't attend.

Enough people came by around 8:30pm to start the event. After meeting new people like Max from Codemasters, we went through the agenda.

i) Letting ppl know what IGDA Malaysia will be doing.
I let everyone know that IGDA Malaysia is a community of volunteers: it cannot be anything more than what the people within are willing to give.

I outlined that IGDA Malaysia will focus on

-> Being a source of information on game efforts in Malaysia. IGDA Malaysia will work on letting others know what's going on regarding game development, like what companies are around, what colleges/unis do games, and so on.
-> being neutral in a sense that it won't endorse or take the side of any company, learning institution or government. It will do so by focusing on the individual. We will work on identifying and supporting individuals doing game development.
-> providing linkages between individuals. As Chapter Coordinator, my role is to coordinate the efforts relating to game development. So my job is to gather what efforts are happening, and link the people doing these efforts to those that could support them.

Issues raised:
Terence pointed out that IGDA Malaysia will need a lot of volunteers to get such activities running. That will be a big issue, and cannot be solved in the short run.

Max asked a question to the audience: what do they want out of joining IGDA? Answers gained were:
Terence: Meeting people doing similar things, so that they can share opinions and techniques.
Fairuz: Working in Nokia, Fairuz said he wanted to find others doing mobile game development and creating mobile content, because that's what the current mobile-based companies need right now.
Max: To know the programming environment within Malaysia. He'd like to know what kind of programmers are available, and what platform/languages do they focus on.

Chuah pointed out that directory of Malaysian game developers would be a very good thing to have.

I proposed the idea of doing a Formal Meeting, three months from now.

Actions to be taken (links lead to IGDA Malaysia threads):
Formal IGDA Chapter Meeting
Core Meetings

ii) Non-compete clauses in Malaysia.
Joo spoke about the nature of Non-Compete Clauses in Malaysia, and how it affects local developers.

According to his research, such clauses are recognized by Malaysian law (an Act created in the 1950s). There are two situations where such clauses, once signed, are not considered applicable:

One: The signer can claim that they had no legal counsel when they signed the document.
Two: Such a document is only recognized if it is officially stamped.

Max pointed out a similar case in Canada, where Ubisoft tried to hold 8 leaving employees on an NCC. The motion was denied because such clauses were not recognized by Canadian law.

A question was raised on what IGDA Malaysia should do with this information. Should it take legal action on the behalf of any game developer hit by such a clause?

It was noted that IGDA Malaysia alone does not have the resources to take legal action. The steps IGDA Malaysia can do is to provide linkages for the afflicted game developer to seek legal advice on what to do, and to inform the community at large on the situation.

It was pointed out that taking action regarding these clauses is what the government should do. Therefore the best action should be to compile information on cases like these, and to pass it over to MDeC.


iii) An IGDA Student Chapter in Malaysia
A discussion on Student Chapters, and action, are detailed here.

Iris, President of MMU-GDC, asked whether IGDA Malaysia would provide support to the Club. She was notified that IGDA Malaysia has identified two individuals who were willing to give support and advice to MMU students on game dev : Jeevan Prasad (2nd batch game dev alumni) and Aznan Falzi (Final Year game dev). Both of them has agreed to volunteer for IGDA Malaysia and directly support the MMU students with their knowledge and experience.

Whether or not other colleges/unis can find similar support is something IGDA needs to work on, but IGDA Malaysia will do what it can.

Gaming club
John and Josh brought up the idea of IGDA Malaysia supporting Gaming events, or even a Gaming Club.

I pointed out that IGDA Malaysia is meant to support game developers. We could support game players, but the point of the organization is for supporting developers first. I spoke my views that the people who focused on playing games well and people who focused on making games tend to be two different kinds of people.

John asked what if the Gaming Club would do game development as well. Joo pointed out that doing that is tantamount to hacking the idea: tacking on game development just to make the Club part of IGDA Malaysia. Sam of HELP also mentioned that it's doing what IGDA Malaysia does in reverse, and it's best to allocate IGDA Malaysia resources to what IGDA Malaysia does primarily.

Buzz spoke out that modding is a path gamers take to become game developers, and it is quite a popular option.

Josh pointed out that historically, the progression of people moving from game players to game developers is quite varied, and has interesting situations. He spoke about various efforts related to moving players into becoming developers, such as having modding events, meetings with level developers like Levelord, and so on.

At this point, it's 10pm and Kinos Cafe closed. We adjourned to Starbucks.

I said that IGDA Malaysia has no business telling him what people should and should not do for game development. Josh could, for example, go ahead and create an initiative to support game players, and IGDA Malaysia wouldn't say anything about it. In fact, IGDA Malaysia would support it by letting others know about such initiatives. By letting the public know about various gaming and game development events, Malaysia could be shown to have active gamers and game development communities, and in the long run, that's good for game developers.

I encouraged Josh and John to create a separate entity whose primary focus is to create and handle gaming events and gamers, so that they don't need to refer to anyone on whether or not they should do something in it. Such an entity can co-exist with IGDA Malaysia, so that both gamers and game developers are catered for. For example, the Gaming club could run gaming events while IGDA Malaysia help organize modding events that run concurrently.

Discussion and small talk continued until about midnight.