January 12, 2017, Thursday

 

Magandang umaga sa ating lahat! Good morning and Happy New Year! Thank you very much for having me today!

I’d like to welcome our visitors to the Philippines. Mabuhay!

I’ve been working with the Philippine game development industry for a while.

But for many of you here that are visiting, you might be surprised that game development and eSports are thriving in our country.

The Philippines is known for other things.

Like, one, our beaches! Two, personalities like Pia Wurtzbach and Manny Pacquiao, who is now also my colleague in the Senate. Three, our BPO industry, which is now number one in Asia. Four, being the selfie capital of the world! And five, having a colorful political atmosphere.

Nowhere in the top five that I’ve mentioned are our game developers and our gamers. But our gamers have actually been successful in international competitions!

Last year, two Philippine teams qualified and competed in The International – the biggest DOTA tournament in the world – in Seattle, Washington.

Out of around 20,000 teams vying to qualify for this competition, only 18 qualified to compete and two teams are from the Philippines.

Team TnC finished at Top 8 and came home with over 23 million pesos in prize money!

We also have Filipino game developers and studios that have made their mark in the international arena.

In last year’s Tokyo Game Show, Japan’s most important video game convention, saw Seven Pinoy independent game developers.

Keybol Games, Squeeky Wheel Studio, Monstronauts, Unibox, Popsicle Games, Moocho Brain Interactive Designs, and Nico Tuason’s “Games by Nico” – who has also won an award in IGF China.

The game Flippy Bottle Extreme by Derrick Alain Mapagu also became a global hit. It beat out games like Temple Run 2 and even Pokemon Go in the U.S. and went to number on on Google Play in several European countries (United Kingdom, Finland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Austria, Ireland, Latvia, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Estonia).

Kooapps founded by Solon Chen and his friends are now known globally for their online educational games

Dreamlords Digital of Russell Tomas received an honorable mention and was one of the Best In Play awardees in the San Francisco Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 2015.

And Dungeon Souls of Mike Reñevo did very well on Steam.

On the flip side, there are global companies who produce popular games with the help of local, Filipino studios and artists.

Electronic Arts works with FunGuy Studio.

Microsoft worked with Synergy 88 in the Philippines for Gears of War 4.

And Sony’s Naughty Dog worked with Secret 6 on Uncharted 4.

And, lastly, there are prominent Filipino personalities in the international game development industry that are coming home, setting up shop, and pushing local game development forward.

Walter De Torres from Microsoft is setting up a studio here.

There is Eric Pangilinan from Naughty Dog, and for those of you who actually finished Uncharted 4, he is the second or third name that comes up in the credits.

 Richie Corpus, who heads the graphical business unit of AMD,

And Chip Go of Ubisoft all supporting the Philippine game development industry.

Ubisoft has set up shop in Sta. Rosa, Laguna and even forged a partnership with a prominent university – De La Salle University – to offer a Major in Game Development.

We do see a lot of ingredients in the Philippine gaming industry. In Esports, in game development, whether it is in mobile, in outsourced work for larger companies, we do have that here in the Philippines.

And we do believe that if we strengthen academic-industry linkages and work with our schools to develop the skills and creativity of future Filipino game developers, we will be able to grow this industry more.

We have been working very hard to attract new studios to set up here and to enable existing studios to grow into even bigger successes!

My office supports the game industry not only because I am a gamer myself but because we see the tremendous potential of this industry.

In fact, many times I have said that this is where our BPO industry was ten years ago. All the ingredients are there to really make this work and really make this happen. And primary of which is the Filipinos’ combination of artistry and technical know-how that can be the foundation for the game development industry in the Philippines.

Today we are with visitors from other countries. We hope that we can learn from your collective experiences. We can learn from China, from North America, from Europe – all of the game developers here who have come to our beautiful country, the Philippines.

We hope we can learn from you, learn from your experiences and at the same time we hope that you can also learn from the stories of Filipino entrepreneurs who are here today working not only to advance their own companies, but to advance our country through this very high potential industry which we call the game development industry. 

Our office is here to support, and together, we all see that the future is bright for this industry.

Sama-sama po tayong lahat sa industriyang ito.

Maraming, maraming salamat po.

Thank you very much!