MassDiGI, colleges boosting video games

Nikita Virani (right), CEO of Boston-based educational game developer Wizdy, works with a student at the 2016 MassDiGi game challenge, held at Microsoft New England in Cambridge.

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By Laura Finaldi

Up on the fourth floor of 20 Franklin St., down several winding hallways and past a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the Worcester Commons, lies the offices of video game startup Petricore.

Inside the office, three recent Becker College graduates in their early 20s furiously type away at their laptops, designing their latest game. The space, with its big comfy couch and candy bowl filled to the top, has a few of the staples usually associated with game development startups in Boston or Cambridge.

This kind of environment is not something you see too often in Worcester, but that is something that is likely to change soon. Local startups, colleges and the state’s video game industry organization have fostered a vibrant game development culture in Worcester and are working toward accelerating it so more entrepreneurs from area colleges will stick around after they graduate.

Both Becker and Worcester Polytechnic Institute are focusing on incubators as part of their video game strategy going forward. Later this year, Becker will open the Colleen C. Barrett Center for Global Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which will provide support for 100 students per year in video game development as well as an incubator space for startups. At WPI’s Foisie Innovation Studio, which is in the works, incubation and video games will be a focus.

“Over time, the community here will grow and be able to support itself much in the way we see in some other places, even if it’s not at the same scale,” said Timothy Loew, founder and executive director of MassDiGI, the statewide center for the digital and video game industries.

Industry overview

The video game industry in Worcester didn’t really exist until MassDiGI established itself here in 2011, Loew said. The organization based itself at Becker with the hope of growing the industry statewide, but Loew had his eye on Worcester from the start. Both Becker and WPI regularly graduate many talented and successful game developers, but there needs to be a way to keep that talent local.

“You have two of the top academic institutions within game development in the country – both Becker and WPI have been nationally ranked. Between the two schools, you have 600 or 700 graduate or undergraduate students from video game programs per year,” he said. “That’s a significant sort of critical mass of student activity. That means Worcester has an opportunity to capture some of the activity as it graduates from some of the campuses.”

Every summer, MassDiGI holds a competitive summer internship program, where 24 college students from as far away as California and Ireland come to Worcester for a 12-week program with the goal of producing a shippable game. Mass DiGI also offers Live Code, a course that allows students to work on real video games, making adjustments and changes to them based on analytics. Live Code is open to students at any school with courses in game development, Loew said.

The industry in Worcester is very focused on mobile gaming, Loew said, a trend that resonates on an international level. Gone are the days when console games dominated the market. According to McKinsey & Co.’s Global Media Report for 2015, growth in the video game industry has been fueled by digital products. McKinsey predicted that video gaming will be one of the fastest-growing industries in the digital world over the next five years.

A joint study on the U.S. video game industry from the Entertainment Software Association and research firm the NPD Group found that sales of software content, including packaged goods, mobile games and other revenue streams, exceeded $16.5 billion in 2015, a 7-percent increase from the $15.4 billion it generated the year before.

In Massachusetts, the video game industry is very much built on networking, said Emma Clarkson, a designer for Marlborough game developer Outact, because a lot of the employers here are smaller, as opposed to the San Francisco Bay area, where the abundance of large video game companies means that people who get laid off have plenty of backup options.

That is not the case in a market dominated by small businesses, Clarkson said.

“People know each other in more intimate ways because they depend on small projects to get by,” she said.

As area meetups grow and colleges like Becker and Worcester Polytechnic Institute produce smart and creative video game students, the industry is likely to grow in Massachusetts outside of Greater Boston, Clarkson said.

“Everyone says you have to be in Cambridge or Boston if you want to be appealing to a certain type of employee, but I don’t think that’s true anymore,” she said. “You can get so much space for your money if you’re able to look outside city location.”

Another popular platform for game developers is virtual reality. At WPI, a small group of students who met in a class this past October formed startup Broken Door Studio, whose virtual reality game, Intern Astronaut, won MassDiGI’s game challenge pitch contest last month.

In the game, you’re on a spaceship, but you’re an intern, so you have no idea what to do; and the challenge is to follow instructions sent to you in order to sail the ship smoothly.

The Broken Door team was scheduled to travel to San Francisco in search of venture capital funding this week, said Sean Halloran, the team’s programmer. Broken Door is a four-person team with mostly technical skills, who learned their business savvy with the help of WPI professors, MassDiGI and connections in the local gaming community, Halloran said.

Halloran said he enjoys going to meetups at area incubator Running Start, which hosts a game development collaborative called the Worcester Game Pile.

“A lot of that stuff you think about when you think about starting a company in Boston – a developer network, startup assistance – is becoming more and more available in Worcester,” he said.

Leading by example

Petricore founder Ryan Canuel and several members of his team were at one point MassDiGI summer interns, Loew said. Now they’re the example of the kind of company that MassDiGI hopes will come regularly out of the colleges, he said.

“We couldn’t have written a better story,” Loew said.

Petricore has leaned on Becker a lot for support, Canuel said. After the company outlined its plans to Dr. Robert E. Johnson, the Becker president, Johnson agreed to let the college pay Petricore’s rent at 20 Franklin St.

When the new Barrett Center opens, Petricore will probably move to its incubation space, so it can serve as an example to student startups and be closer to the college that helped it get where it is today.

“All the support that Becker has given us has been huge,” Canuel said. “Them being here and doing what they’re doing is awesome.”