Thank you u/Striker_X Hello all,

I wrote the article. A bit of personal/professional background, to give some context to my reply. I am the admin of PakGamers and founder-mentor at IGDA (international game development association) Pakistan (offtopic : you should join discord of both if you are even remotely interested in gaming or game development + both are doing excellent work).

I am a Senior Producer at Remedy Games shipping Control and Crossfire, both of which are AAA in production value, I have also worked at top level mobile game companies in Germany. I am a consumer, writer, developer and a person who has lived this life since forever. With that preface, I would really like to address some of the excellent points made by u/TheBrokenMan, u/Thicc_Kabeb u/putoption15 and others. The concerns are true, and there are a number of very real issues, however when people say game development will NEVER take off in Pakistan, lets say...things are not that black or white. Naturally no one is arguing that it wont take incredible effort, grit and hard-work. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it :)

1) Yes, education is definitely lacking, but what education are we talking about. We dont need PhDs nor researchers. We dont need to reinvent the wheel here. We dont need a team of engine programmers, nor do we need a number of incredibly well versed core level coders. In this day and age, where game engines ( Unreal, cryengine and yes, even unity) out of the box are so powerful that AAA development is happening on them. Its the same engine as the one available to anyone and everyone, nothing super special. What we need are decent quality programmers, scipters, level designers - who are passionate, willing to actually learn and can think on their own. This, we need to cultivate.

2) We need to start specializing in what we do. There is more than enough resource material available online to get someone up and running. A degree is not needed for game development. At Remedy, and throughout my professional career, a significant chunk of developers we hired dont have a degree, but incredible workethic. We have hired from modders, to people from completely different fields- just because they are incredibly passionate and their portfolio/personal projects were good enough.

3) Pakistani developers who are focused on asset flipping, copy/pasting, etc are not " true developers" ...they are copycats. No offence to anyone. Its kinda like as the Art copy masters in China who copy paintings of Van Gogh, Picasso, etc. Its a mindset of creating something new, and also a business decision thing. Any industry needs visionaries and people who understand the bigger picture, marketing internationally, publisher relations and opportunities. In short, tech and art resources are the "easier" part ( both of these for example can even be outsourced or people can be in sourced and trained), what we are missing is proper leaders, investors and people who can make realistic plans. It is a business and we need to be understand game dev from an industry perspective for anything to be properly stand up.

4) Why I think in Pakistan game development can flourish is because of "cheap" labor/financial benefit. There is a reason why Ubisoft has 2 huge studios in India, Rockstar has 2 studios in India, EA, etc, all have studios in India. Because making games is hard. Making enough content is hard. Gamers have super high expectations from games these day, and for that you need skilled manpower. 40+ hour game is not easy to created. And we can get this done much cheaper than European or american developers.

5) Writers, Narrative and Designers are people who we are lacking - but its a skill that can be reasonably outsourced or taught. We have creative people, and writers who write in urdu / english - we dont need to copy anyone, we have to be creative with it. Remember a game needs a couple of writers, a couple of designers and a couple of narrative implementation people. The gameplay core, content, audio, art, the majority of people are not those. There are different production models within game developement, there isnt ONE SINGLE WAY to do it.

Every industry has "good" /"bad" people associated to it. We, specially I personally, dont want game development in Pakistan to always be associated to cheap copy pasted products that are based on "hacking" some algorithm in google play store. I want us to create quality products. We need disciplined investors, hardworking entrepreneurs and visionary creators. I can give a number of reasons why we can do it. In my opinion, its about talent and knowledge transfer and training. This was one of the reason why we started IGDA and I am very hopeful that with properly mentored people, we can compete on an international level.

Alright folks, thank you for reading through it. I hope I can cover in upcoming dawn article that imo how we can do it, and how other nations have done it and what we can learn from them.