DREW VO: We’ve seen the game situation in Brazil from the perspective of the consumer,
the fans, and the media, but what about the ones who actually make games here?
I’d always found it odd to hear so often about Brazil’s rabid fanaticism for video
games, but never about games that came from Brazil.
Aside from a few outliers, I couldn’t point to one big, defining game company.
The country is big enough, so why is this the case?
Was it some weird knock-on effect of the country’s restrictions on electronics?
Or something else?
To find out, I started with Lannie Neely, an indie developer I met in São Paulo.
As an American living in Brazil, I figured Lannie would be a good way to bridge the cultures.
LANNIE: There are creative people doing art, they're doing programming, they're doing music,
they're setting up their own teams, in a way.
But you don't really hear about them a lot and what they're dealing with.
There's the team in Brasilia who did "Chroma Squad,” and a couple others here and there.
I think "Papo & Yo" became really popular for being Brazilian.
But then you look at other indie games and you see the credits, even if it's a three-,
four-, five-person team.
It's like, "Oh, the art was made by a Brazilian.
Oh, one of the programmers was Brazilian, contracted.
One of the musicians."
"TowerFall" is a great example.
It was a huge hit, and its artistic redesign was made possible by Studio MiniBoss, which
are a great couple people who live here in São Paulo.
But when you think of "TowerFall" you don't think, "Oh, this is a Brazilian game" or "Brazilians
worked on it."
They're kind of in the shadows.
It's like the indie scene is secretly layered with Brazilians who are multitalented and
giving out their expertise everywhere you look.
DREW VO: Brazil’s distributed, scattershot nature of game development is changing.
As you might expect from a society of like-minded game fans, game developers have started to
band together.
Dumativa, Rafael Bastos’ company based in Rio de Janeiro, is a perfect example.
Within this so-called “indie house” are two recording studios, a video set, and
multiple workspaces for Dumativa and other folks they’ve partnered with, like game
developers, and even YouTube channels.
RAFAEL: Here we are trying to make something that Rio de Janeiro don't have.
We're trying to make a place for YouTubers and producers to integrate and try to make
the content and deliver the content to the audience.
It's an experimental thing.
We're still trying to make this work.
Some of the government is trying to make this work too, with some public investments.
And with public investments comes the private investments.
Our companies are working together to make other companies grow, so we give lectures,
workshops.
We're not afraid of having competitors here in Brazil because we need that for the environment.
DREW VO: Dumativa is part of a larger informal partnership called RING, which includes more
than a dozen developers around the Rio area,
many of whom were there that day.
Bruno showed us Sword Legacy.
BRUNO: It’s a tactical RPG.
It’s our vision of the Arthurian legend.
DREW VO: Camilla demoed Holodrive.
CAMILLA: We like to say it’s like Quake meets Mario Kart in 2D.
DREW VO: Fernando brought The Light of the Darkness.
FERNANDO: It’s an indie game which I’m developing for many years.
More than seven years.
DREW VO: Kim showed off Racket Boy.
KIM: He received the racket and the scarf from a capybara.
DREW VO: And Jonathan showed us a fighting game called Suits of Fate, the only game we
saw that day that featured elements of Brazilian culture.
Matheus is a member of the popular YouTube channel Castro Brothers, and is making
a game based on a video they made.
MATHEUS: It was meant to be a joke, but the joke caught on.
People thought it was an actual game, even though it wasn’t.
We just faked one.
We did a crowdfunding campaign in 2014 and we released in Portuguese only in 2016, last
year.
It’s like Bastion, like the Stanley Parable, but within the song.
He’s singing a lot, and it changes depending on what you do and what you don’t do, and
it’s all in the key, with the sync of the tune.
[Underwater gurgling noises]
RAFAEL: That’s the international joke. Everybody gets that.
MATHEUS: Right now we are in the stage of trying to localize more than 3000 stanzas
into English, and make it rhyme and make it work
and sing all this.
DREW: Wow. MATHEUS: Yeah.
The crowdfunding campaign was only limited to Brazil, in Portuguese only.
We didn't go, like other Brazilian devs do, to Kickstarter
or Indiegogo and ask a global audience for the money.
We thought, “Nah, why would we do that?” We had this local audience that was
really craving for the idea of the game, so it actually worked out for the best.
If we did a global campaign, even if we tried to explain the mechanic,
it might have done okay, but maybe not as well as it did with the local audience.
We were able to do a more focused campaign and that's something that's important about crowdfunding.
You have to have laser focus on who you're talking to to make it work.
If you're trying to speak to one audience and another at the same time in English and Portuguese, no,
it gets kind of muddy and you get kind of lost in it.
We made this gamble. We will bet on the Brazilian audience, the audience that watches our videos
and liked them, and it paid off.
DREW VO: But there are risks involved with targeting Brazil only.
As Bruno told us, there’s a reason his team decided to base their game on the legend of
King Arthur.
BRUNO: We think it's easier to promote the game with a classical, universal history.
Of course, we had a lot of ideas to make games from the Brazilian culture, but I think it's
very risky.
You have some games from Brazil that they achieved good sales, but if you go to SteamSpy,
for example, and “Let me see how many sales is from Brazil.”
Probably you see 10 percent, 20 percent from Brazil only. Because the Brazilian player
still prefers to play the Assassin’s Creed, and the GTA, and these triple-A games.
So I think it's very dangerous to Brazilian developers to release their games onto the
Brazilian market.
We have people always say, "Oh, it's a Brazilian movie, I don't like it.
It's a Brazilian game, probably not a good game."
It's wrong, but I think this happens also because the media, the Brazilian media, don't
show the Brazilian games how they show the international, the blockbuster games.
DREW VO: That sentiment seems to be changing, especially with more and more events like
the Brazil Game Show.
RAFAEL: They are pretending they are working.
DREW: [laughs]
JOAO: All beer in the world has vanished and now they have to find out why.
With some major game events that are occurring here in Brazil, we were able to make people
see the game.
These kinds of events are getting bigger and bigger with time.
And I think that the public here in Brazil are starting to really see Brazilian-made games as
a product of quality, because we're really trying to make a quality product.
If we don't put enough effort and if we don't go one step further than whatever has already
been made in Brazil, we're not going to succeed in this hill we're trying to climb here.
DREW VO: A more indie-friendly culture seems to be on the horizon in Brazil.
I asked Camilla what happens when Brazilians play Holodrive.
CAMILLA: A lot of people get really surprised.
We were actually in Rock in Rio, which is a super huge music entertainment event where
lots of bands and singers come from all over the world for two weekends, and there are
millions of people walking by, and they played our games, and they were super excited.
They were like, "I didn't know games like this were made in Brazil."
They had no idea because we have this culture that video games are something that just come
from outside.
They didn't even know someone could make games.
They don't even think about that.
It's a struggle to actually...
If someone young wants to study games, they have to explain and it's really hard to explain
to their parents or their family what they are going to do and so we're starting to make
an example and cases.
DREW VO: These attitudes make it difficult to secure funding in Brazil from any source
other than crowdfunding.
Camilla translated for Kim, who explained what having a business in Brazil is like.
CAMILLA: Brazil is not an easy place to be an entrepreneur, to start your own business.
On top of that, we are constantly trying to explain to people what is a game, why is making
games relevant, why is this something that people should be doing, why there should be
investments on this area and everything.
It's a constant struggle, putting two very different and hard things together.
DREW VO: Camilla’s own company, BitCake, had to go halfway around the world to learn
how to secure a publisher.
CAMILLA: The industry here is developing now, so we're just starting, and it's a bit hard
for us to get attention from outside.
But now we're growing and we had the opportunity to go to Estonia and be accelerated by GameFounders
which is a game-only accelerator in Europe.
We had this experience and was very good to develop the company, understand a bit more
about business, get to know a lot of people.
I think that helped us want to get a publisher and then get a publisher.
DREW VO: Hearts and minds are changing in Brazil.
Games are becoming more accepted, making it easier to convince local investors.
BRUNO: You have here in Brazil an explosion of eSports.
Now you have big awards for the winners with a lot of money, so I think some older people
is changing his mind about the games.
“Oh, it's not a thing for child playing.
It's a serious market.”
It's bigger than the movies market now.
So I think it's changing, but in Brazil everything is slow.
CAMILLA: Nowadays we have the advantage that people are playing games on their day-to-day
life, like people are on the subway, they have a cellphone, they're playing games on
a smartphone.
When he gets asked about that he can just answer, "But how do you think your life would
be if you had nothing to play?
Do you really not think this is something important for people's lives?
Having some entertainment, having games to play?"
So there is this advantage nowadays.
Also, games are something that he's really passionate about, that we, as Brazilians,
are passionate about, so there's also this element we can explain saying, "This is something
that we really love doing, that we really want to do, and there is value to doing this,
bringing joy to other people's lives by making games."
DREW VO: But why now?
What changed?
What is helping Brazilian developers now surmount traditional roadblocks like sigmas and piracy?
MATHEUS: Steam is actually helping quite a lot with piracy in Brazil.
Digital games in general.
It began with Steam but it's actually helping quite a lot.
Piracy is still rampant in Brazil, more than most anywhere else in the world, but we are
doing okay.
I see people actually realizing that, “dude, maybe we should buy those games if we want
people to be able to make them.”
The indie scene helped this a lot because people were thinking, "Ah, they got millions
of dollars, what's just one customer?
I mean, it's not like it will make a difference."
With indie developers that they can know and get to talk to on the internet, they say,
"Oh, wait.
My money might actually help?
Yeah, I want more of this, so this has a palpable effect, a tiny difference, so maybe I should
help with my wallet," and they do.
It's showing improvements.
I'm very optimistic about the gaming scene in Brazil.
CAMILLA: I think what changed is that the community of developers started working more
together and acknowledging that we can only go so far if we go alone and we have to get
out there and show the country as a whole what we are doing.
Before, there were a few companies making games, but they didn't talk so much, they
weren't connected.
Sometimes they had some kind of competitive feel, like, "You are making also a game and
you are a competitor of mine."
Nowadays we don't have that vision, so we think that we are all in this together.
If you are successful, I will be more successful because you are.
We need cases.
We need someone to be super successful so everyone will look at us and see, "Oh, this
is a profitable business, this is something that is good for our society as a whole."
We need everyone to succeed.
DREW VO: The importance of collaboration is an attitude that spans Brazil, reaching as
far as the retro-futuristic capital city of Brasilia, deep in the heart of the country.
Saulo Camarotti is the founder of Behold Studios, creators of Chroma Squad and Knights of Pen
and Paper.
Just recently, Behold opened a coworking space in Brasilia called the Indie Warehouse.
SAULO: We want to share the costs of having a studio.
We want to help marketing, QA, testing and everything to release the weight off the shoulders
of the developers so they can focus on their games and do better stuff.
Usually Brazilians tend to think as a collective.
They're always trying to share their experience, they always want to talk about what they’re
learning, what they’re creating.
For more than 20 years video games were just a foreign thing for us.
We didn't develop games here in Brazil.
Everything was very expensive.
But for the past 10 years with internet, with the platforms and consoles opening up for
the indie developers, the technology is more accessible right now.
We have a lot of engines that are free.
We have everything that we need to work, the tools that we need is very accessible.
Now, we have a lot of developers that are starting to create their own games.
DREW VO: To break in the warehouse, Behold was hosting their inaugural game jam.
The theme for the jam was arcade games.
In Brazil, arcades are known as “fliperamas.”
Thus, Flipper Jam.
DREW: Do you get to sleep?
FILIPE: No. [laughs]
We decided to make a game about creating an arcade.
The players will have to chop the wood, to assemble the pieces together to create an arcade
DREW: You're using Unity?
FILIPE: Yes.
I'm a great fan of Unity.
It is great to the community.
It helps a lot.
Mainly us here in Brazil, we don't have too much attention to the game developers at all.
But recently, Unity, and Unreal, also, but mostly Unity, have been to every event that we have
around here.
Even in Brasilia, that is a small town, Unity is always present.
It is always going to the events and giving stuff to developers.
I think it's pretty cool.
It helps us a lot.
DREW: Yeah, it's great to see people finally noticing Brazil and saying, "Oh, people want
to make games here."
FILIPE: Yeah, we exist! [laughs]
[counting down in Portuguese]
[cheering]
DREW VO: Not only do game developers exist in Brazil, there is a palpable feeling here
of change, of optimism, hope for the future.
And if I learned anything from the people I met in Brazil, it’s that even in the face
of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, they have the passion, creativity, and drive to
make whatever they want a reality.
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