Australian Games market is still strong despite COVID-19

IGEA, a trade body, has recently reported that the Australian games industry has not only remained stable through the past 12 months, it has seen some levels of growth. This should be no surprise given how well games sold in 2020, and how many new people came to enjoy games hardware to remain entertained during the pandemic.

According to the report, 62 percent of the surveyed studios reported increased or stable revenue through the last year. When asked the year before, only 33 percent of the surveyed companies said the same.

63 percent of all these studios said that they had plans to increase in staff in the short-term, with only 4 percent of them planning redundancies. This speaks volumes as to how well the industry has done, though there’s still some room for improvement.

31 percent of those surveyed actually reported a loss in contractual revenue over the last year, and 61 percent added that they were impacted negatively due to travel restrictions and an inability to travel in some cases. The issues range from loss of funding due to meetings being missed or an inability to communicate remotely, to contracts simply being terminated.

Work practises had also been impacted. 50 percent of respondents said that they’d been moved to working remotely, and that this had impacted how productive they are. 10 percent said that their productivity had been significantly impacted. This difference will be down to which companies were set up to work remotely already, and which would never have accepted it before COVID-19.

60 percent of the studios surveyed now have a hybrid model of staff working remotely and in the office with a healthy balance. This helped studios hire outside of their normal radius. 33 percent of companies hired from out of state, and 28 percent from overseas. This is reflected around the world, with many studios now hiring talent where they can find it, instead of insisting on staff being able to come into the office every single day.

The Australian games industry recently received some good news from the government, with a 30 percent tax relief for the games industry, the first for the industry ever.