Thailand’s Game Development Scene is a Force to be Reckoned With
Thailand makes games the world wants to play, and Xbox is excited to connect with the Thai game dev community.
Not only is Thailand home to some incredible games, including the Home Sweet Home (Yggdrazil) horror series as well as more recent indie darlings like Timelie (Urnique), M.A.S.S Builder (Vermillion Digital), and Land Beneath Us (FairPlay studios), it is also home to some of the most welcoming, generous and kind game developers I’ve had the privilege of meeting in all my years in this industry.
Over the past two years, I’ve supported game developers across Southeast Asia as part of our Global Expansion efforts at Xbox. In that time, I’ve met with many Thai developers at regional and international industry events who ask me the same thing: “When is Xbox coming to Thailand?”
On July 18, we finally made good on our promise to visit Thailand by organizing the very first Xbox Discovery Day in Bangkok. It was attended by over 120 developers and industry professionals from Thailand’s very own game dev community. We shared a jam-packed agenda, including getting started with ID@Xbox, pitching your games and getting funded at Xbox, marketing tips and tricks, and kickstarting your developer journey on our platform.
Additionally, we took the time to meet with many developers one-on-one to learn more about their games, studios, and how we can support them more directly. We learned so much from the developers about their ecosystem, what they care about (making incredible games, upskilling their teams, and having more opportunity on the global stage), and what they need from platforms like ours (funding, dev kits, and marketing).
Richmond Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Bit Egg Inc., shared “[Xbox Discovery Day] was a great event. One of the most exciting game events I’ve been to. It’s clear [Xbox] did a lot of research into what kind of help developers in underrepresented regions need and how to help them.”
What excited me most about Thailand is how much the game developer community there is working hard to help themselves. We partnered very closely with Game Developer Gathering (GDG), a community-led group for developers by developers in the lead up to Xbox Discovery Day. They shared information about our upcoming event to their entire network, reaching over 10,000 community members, and helped manage and communicate ongoingly with attendees. GDG even created a publicly available document that lists all the upcoming and current games made by Thai studios that they distribute broadly to potential publishers, investors, platforms and any interested parties.
This demonstrates to me a game dev community that is determined to raise themselves up to the global stage - a common trait found in Southeast Asian game developers across the region. But, for Thailand in particular, the time and energy they put in to ensure that all their community have access to the necessary information, resources, and learnings to be a world-class game development ecosystem is what makes me so bullish for Thailand’s game dev scene.
Tunyatorn Sangpunyaruk, Founder of Barking Kitten Interactive and one of the community leaders of GDG shared, “Thank you for visiting us and hosting such an amazing event! You gave me, the Thai game dev community and Thailand more than you can imagine!”
We also held a closed-door roundtable in which we spoke with representatives from the Digital Economy Promotion Agency (depa) and the Digital Innovative Design and Technology Center (DIDTC), as well as members of GDG and TGA (Thai Game Software Industry Association) to understand how Xbox can support unlocking more opportunities for game developers at a country-level. We’re thankful for the opportunity and time to meet with such agents of change, who have been working hard to grow and support their ecosystem for years and will continue to do so.
“We will always strive for the betterment of the Thai game industry and we will explore more ways to do so thanks to [Xbox],” Chatchai Khunpitiluck, Senior Executive Vice President, Digital Economy Promotion Agency (depa).
I’m so excited by so many incredible upcoming games and studios we’ve had the privilege of seeing during our visit to Thailand (check out Lost and Found Co. by Bit Egg, Aether: Wizard Life by Vonder Games, Seed of Heroes by Vermillion Digital, and Northwind by Barking Kitten Interactive, to name a few). Even more, I’m excited by the people and their determination to see their community succeed and be seen. And we’re going to do our bit as Xbox to help them every step of the way.