Meet the main game companies in Brazil

The Brazilian games industry is not just about players. She also produces. The number of video game studios in the country more than doubled between 2018 and 2022, driven by the pandemic and the adoption of new business models.

Today, there are 1,009 formalized developers in the country, according to the 2022 Brazilian Games Industry Survey, released by Abragames (Brazilian Association of Electronic Games Developers) at the BIG Festival.

This represents a growth of 152% compared to 2018, when the sector had 375 companies. In 2014, there were 133.

“Right now, the whole world is looking at the games sector as the future, with great economic potential. Much of this desire to undertake within this market is because now, in Brazil, we have a level of maturity that already reduces uncertainties. Today it’s something you don’t have so much doubt about whether it can work or not”, said Rodrigo Terra, president of Abragames.

According to consultancy Newzoo, the video game market is expected to move US$ 203.1 billion (R$ 1 trillion) in 2022, a growth of 5.4% compared to 2021.

In the country, the sector shows concrete signs of maturity. The Game Brasil Survey, released in April, showed that 74.5% of Brazilians said they used to play video games. Independent and low-budget titles produced here, such as “Unsighted”, achieved international visibility last year. Companies outside the industry try to talk to a younger audience using the gamer identity.

But Brazilian developers do not survive only on the domestic market. According to research by Abragames, 57% of developers had international revenues in 2021. This is because digital platforms such as the Apple Store, Google Play and Steam make it easy for titles to be marketed anywhere in the world.

“A game studio today is born internationalized. Digital game distribution platforms touch almost the entire territory of the planet, and this means that games made in the interior of Brazil can be distributed globally”, says Rodrigo Terra.

Production also grows. The 223 studios that responded to the Abragames survey developed 715 games in 2020. In 2021, there were 901, a growth of 26.3%.

The 2022 Brazilian Games Industry Survey also highlights the ten largest game companies in the country, ranked according to the number of employees registered on LinkedIn. THE Sheet spoke to three of them.

afterverse

Afterverse is a studio formed in 2021 that was born from the children’s content platform PlayKids, from the Movile group. In 2019, the developer created the game “Crafty Lands”, whose success led to “PK XD”, a kind of metaverse for children.

The title has already had more than 500 million downloads and today has 30 million active users. Most players are concentrated in Latin America, Southeast Asia and the United States.

“‘PK XD’ is a social experience, so a lot of what we see as the game’s biggest success is users coming back, and more than that, how those users talk about the product outside of the product itself,” explains Felipe Hayashida, COO. from Afterverse.

In addition to the financial success, game-related content generates tens of millions of views per week on YouTube and TikTok.

“Much of the market growth in Brazil comes from this moment of faster exporting what we have been doing. There is more and more knowledge being built, local players and the opportunity for Brazilian games to be taken to the whole world”, he said. Hayashida.

aquiris

Aquiris was founded in 2007 and has worked on both its own products and other brands. In addition to “Horizon Chase” (2015) and “Wonderbox” (2021), its main intellectual properties, it has produced games for Looney Tunes and Cartoon Network over the past decade.

In 2019, Apple selected the company to debut the Apple Arcade game subscription service. In April of this year, the developer received an investment from Epic Games, owner of “Fortnite”.

At the time, the companies announced a publishing deal for several unannounced cross-platform games. The value of the investment was not disclosed.

“We have a lot to gain from partnering with Epic due to the very profile of the studios in which the company has invested before. Psyonix, from ‘Rocket League’, and Mediatonic from ‘Fall Guys’, are developers with audiences that talk a lot with our type of game”, says Sandro Manfredini, business director at Aquiris.

“It is a seal of quality of what Latin America as a whole has to offer. These movements tend to become more and more frequent. They give a clear signal to the world that we are not only a large consumer market but also a developer of products.

Kokku

Founded in 2011, Kokku is a company specialized in providing services such as co-development and game development (CoDev and FullDev), and production of concept and 3D arts for mobile, console and PC games.

In recent years, he has worked with studios such as Activision and TreyArch, on “Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War” (2020), and Guerrilla Games, on “Horizon Zero Dawn” (2017) and “Horizon Forbidden West” (2022).

It also developed titles with intellectual properties from other segments, such as the expansion of the game “Roblox” based on “Stranger Things”, from Netflix.

“We wanted to belong to the world of the biggest franchises, work with the biggest companies and make the most desired games”, explains Thiago de Freitas, CEO of Kokku. “The most important part of having a company like this, which works with large franchises, is investing in relationships, which is what will generate opportunities”.

“We have an increasingly mature industry, with more education for professional development and a relatively stable region. In the next five years, Brazil should emerge among the top ten game development powers,” said Freitas.