The September edition of the Berytech Meetups gathered a young crowd of gaming enthusiasts while speakers discussed the trends and challenges of the gaming industry and shared their own entrepreneurial journey.
Reine Abbas
A gamer since her early teenage years, Reine Abbas worked as a visual artist for Warner Brothers and Digipen before creating her own gaming company Wixel Studios in 2007. She discussed 3 top trends in gaming today:
- Branded games: relying on known characters to succeed with a game ex: Mario Run & Pokemon.
- Freeplay: Free games that have in-app purchases to use characters and open new levels ex: Subway Surfer. Also these game developers are subcontracting in-app purchases to third parties.
- The rise of virtual reality and augmented reality: although they are statistically expected to have a negative growth in the future.
Reine believes in investing in gaming education as little is being done in that respect and advises game developers to build their mobile gaming skills.
Raja Riachi
Raja Riachi created Arab Arcade with game creation events as it’s core activity. Arab Arcade runs game jams for gaming enthusiasts and ideations for artists to pitch their game ideas. His startup is creating ambassadorial programs in the regions to replicate the community in Beirut with the aim to bring in a steady stream of work to rising game developers. Raja’s objective is to create a world-class accelerator accepting projects from the region.
Vince Ghossoub
In 2010, Vince Ghossoub noticed that there are no games with Arabic content so he decided to create his own through Falafel Games. He advises game developers to try to foresee upcoming gaming trends and to ride the early wave in that direction. Vince explains that the competition in the mobile game market is high with a few hundred games surfacing per day. Financial resources are a huge advantage for gaming companies and yet an original idea is a weapon to differentiate your game in what he called a bloodbath competition.
Every month Berytech organizes a community meetup around an interesting subject in science and technology and hosts three guest speakers to share their knowledge and expertise with a passionate audience. For information on the upcoming Berytech Meetups follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.
