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Games

Behind The Brazilian Mobile Gaming Scene: Q&A With MusiGames Founder Giordano Ribeiro

The culture of gaming in Brazil is a strained one due to legal issues. We spoke with one company that’s managed to reach international acclaim.

You've seen the latest apps from MusiGames, the development studio located at Porto Digital, a technological center in Recife, Brazil developed by teachers and technology professionals from UFPE (Pernambuco’s Federal University). We decided to dig a little deeper and delve into their company background because their mission addresses the lack of demand for local technical talent in Brazil. Working within music software development company D’Accord Music Software, MusiGames produce internationally acclaimed music puzzle games like Drums Challenge, which was named one of last year’s "Top 5 Best-Selling Music Games" in the US app store. We went to Porto Digital to speak with founder Giordano Ribeiro about game development and the innovative technology center in which he works.

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The Creators Project: What is MusiGames and how did it all get started?
Giordano Ribeiro: We are a musical computation studio, which focuses on the use of technology in music. This goes from programming synthesizers to building sequencers and interactive softwares. I’m a musician, but I have a degree in computing. I became interested in the area when I was in college, but there was nowhere to work. I put together a company which started making software and tools for teaching music. We then moved to games and working with the idea of using computers to create interactive and intelligent musical instruments.

How did you transition from making educational software to games?
I thought that Brazilians have a very empirical approach towards musicianship, and we’ve found that searching and observing others is the easiest way to learn a specific song. So instead of starting with theory, we chose an approach that a tutor would, which shows you how to play a song, and in the middle of the embedding process, you drop in the theory. Then we realized that our expertise was very similar to game development. We needed to create interactive and fun software to get people interested. We then saw that our team was very prepared to develop a game.

And who chose the iPhone/iPad as a platform for games?
We decided to develop for this platform because it already has a system that integrates production and distribution. Developing a video game is a very expensive process and it must satisfy the tastes of a million people. Of course video game development guarantees a certain commercial success, but it is a difficult market to penetrate.

How do you deal with piracy?
Well, they’re non-authorized games, but that’s a completely different subject. We already have suffered a lot with piracy. Since our inception we’ve had four
million official users, but everyone ends up getting a pirated version of our games, which complicates our conversion rate. So we run away from these non-authorized markets because you never know if it will reap results. In Brazil, the gaming market is very small and there are legal complications because games based on luck are prohibited. In theory, only gambling is banned, but in practice, this created a legal loophole, leaving discourse on these kinds of games out of the legislation. There isn’t even a games category on iTunes in Brazil. The games are found in other categories such as entertainment, but this complicates everything, including the emergence of a culture of purchasable games.

Do you consider games an art form?
I believe that games are, in fact, artworks, but in the same sense as a piece of advertising. Art is not the end, we just feel it necessary to transform our products into
interesting things. The main focus of game developers is to make games as fun as possible, which is an “art” itself. It is much more difficult to create something that is simply beautiful.

How is working within Porto Digital? How do the incubators of new talent help you?
MusiGames was born at the University [UFPE], and this support was crucial to its development. Later, when we had more experience, we moved to Porto Digital. The biggest advantage of being within a technological center is not exactly the support, but the synergy among people in related businesses. The environment of people with similar interests is a great drive for success.