A bit less than a year ago I wrote a post about game development in Belgium. I said that the game development industry in Belgium is slowly growing. Today I say that it is growing a lot faster. Let me provide some more links.
First of, we now have "FLEGA" which is short for the Flemish game association. The intend is to support and group Flemish game developers and represent them on international game conferences, allowing for smaller game studios to be present on these events. I would have liked it to be a Belgian association, since "Flanders" is hardly known in the world and we are still Belgian, but it appears that even in our little sector there is some separation.
If you look at the directory page on the website the number of game developing companies and organizations has grown a lot since last year, compared to the list from Fabrice's website that I used last year as an overview of game developers.
Last year there was talk of funding from the Flemish government. They did as promised and now the project we're working on at Die Keure has received a piece of that budget, among others. Next deadline for projects is the 15th of April, more info can be found on the VAF website. It's a lot of paperwork, but they have very helpful people at the VAF.
I recently attended BETT to promote Monkey Tales Games. I learned there that many publishers and developers are "gamifying" education. I also learned that there are almost no decent educational games, the Monkey Tales Games are easily the best I've seen, without wanting to boast.
Technology will be omnipresent in the future schools, at least if I may believe what I have seen. Smart boards are smarter than ever, there are even motion tracking smart boards, and before we know it, every school will have several tablet classes (movable closets with 20+ tablets in them that replace computer classes). So there is a big fast growing market for educational games.
One thing is for sure in this market: the tablet will be the device of choice, so we better go mobile with our (educational) games.
It's exciting to see all these game companies popping up and creating games, to see that there are a lot of people attending the Global Game Jam and the Unity3D day in Antwerp, that the industry is coming alive. Cool times are coming!
