Drops de Jogos is covering live the DASH Games, a digital games event promoted by ADJogos-RS, at Univates, in Lajeado, Rio Grande do Sul. Among the exhibition of games created by companies and Indies who are part of the association, we chatted with Caco Idiart, president since ADJogos-RS’ foundation, four years ago.
In our quick conversation, Caco evaluated the first day of event and commented on the games development scenery in the South. Check out the main points of our interview.
“It is a business event, we focus a lot on the professional side and we’re getting a lot of feedback from the kids and seeing what they think of the games, it’s really cool”, he told us, relaxed.
“We’d been thinking for a while to work with a DASH in the countryside, because we believe things in the countryside have a larger adhesion”, the organizer commented.
Regarding the diversity of projects present in the show, including psychological terror such as Ni Ju Ni and ludic creations for the child audience, such as the artist Maurício’s transmedia book, animation and CD project (which will soon receive a thematic game also), Caco credits the production to the compromise of the association with qualification of professionals involved.
“We’ve been working with our developers on this ‘opportunity, niche business’ portion for a year more or less at ADJogos, and we are managing to break the logic of people that get into the game market wanting to make ‘the dream game’” explains.
“People now start thinking the production as a business and we see them [the creators] choosing ‘I’m going for this niche’, ‘I’ll go for the children’s market’, ‘I’ll make VR’, already thinking [their production] with a business view which is very important”.
Caco told us that every 15 days the association brings people to discuss important themes for game developing, performing game’s post-mortem with the creators and other similar actions. “We’re bringing some speeches that have helped people get tuned with the market”.
Just four years old, ADJogos is driven by improving companies’ production. “We direct our efforts into qualifying companies’ performance, focused on a business model and this is beginning to show. So much that, in this year’s BIG, we won the Best Brazilian Game award, BIG Starter, which shows the results of this work”, he says.
“The association is working on various different companies in a way that we see games [at DASH exposition] that are still prototypes and games that are almost finished. This way, we’re able to recognize and stratify ‘this team is producing something simple, these guys are more prepared, those guys are already in view…”
This edition’s news was the execution of the activity in Lajeado. Caco, however, estimates that the alternative is more welcome at the event. “‘We’d been thinking for a while to work with a DASH in the countryside, because we believe things in the countryside have a larger adhesion. It doesn’t make much of a difference in logistics to have the activity in Porto Alegre or an hour away from the capital… Then we had this opportunity with Univartes, which is working an innovative content and, in our conversation, we realized the opportunity to perform the event next to the science fair. This was great because one of our concerns with the market is to attract this people to work in our area. We need critical mass to join the market and build better teams”.
“In this sense”, he says “we’re trying to positively influence these kids for the game market”.
The event is happening until Saturday, October 8th. The organizer estimates that until the end, DASH Games should have an expressive amount of more than five thousand visitors.
Drops de Jogos travelled to Lajeado at ADJogosRS invitation.
Paul solo
Jogatina de Natal