Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
Local game developers often hold meetups, such as GameDevDrinkUp at Orbit Pinball Lounge.
The summer of 2010, Sam Coster was trying to organize a game jam (picture a hackathon, 48 hours with little sleep) but wasn’t sure where to find game developers. “I printed a ton of flyers and drove around to all the Best Buys and put them up,” he says. “It took me a whole day.” Three people showed up—but that was just the beginning for local game jams.
Coster’s company, Butterscotch Shenanigans, later received a Mobile Game of the Year nomination for its game “Crashlands” at the 2017 D.I.C.E. Awards, the interactive gaming equivalent of the Oscars. (The winner was “Pokémon Go.”)
See also: Butterscotch Shenanigans: Beating Cancer With Video Games
Coster’s just one among many developers building a local gaming industry that is starting to challenge traditional gaming hubs in larger cities. In January, during the annual Global Game Jam, St. Louis had 239 participants and ranked second in the U.S., behind only New York.
“In a lot of areas, game development tends to be focused on the really big studios,” says Jonathan Leek, who chaired what is now the St. Louis Game Developer Co-op until 2014. “In St. Louis, we’ve been really focused on the little guy.”
“If we were in the supposed hubs for game development, like San Francisco or Seattle, you are one small studio among a billion and nobody really cares so much if you do well or not,” says Coster, “but being one of just a few here, it’s a signal-in-the-noise situation where we are able to stand out.”
St. Louis’ affordable cost of living also makes the city fertile ground for game development. “We can pay ourselves a fraction of what developers in these larger cities expect to earn and still have a high quality of life,” says Carol Mertz, a game developer who teaches at Lindenwood University and founded the PixelPop Festival, an annual indie-game event, being held this year August 5 and 6 at Saint Louis University’s Busch Student Center.
Though people in the venture capital world have also pointed to St. Louis’ affordability when explaining why the local startup scene has blossomed, there’s a key difference: Investors don’t look at video game studios in the same way they do other small tech companies, developers say. Rather, they’re seen as part of the entertainment industry and therefore as riskier bets.
Mertz likens independent games to independent films. “There’s a lot more risk” than with other startups, she says. “I’ve seen a number of studios release games that they’ve pumped years of time and money into developing and promoting, and they launch and fail in some capacity.”
Despite the uncertainty, Mertz thinks there’s room for the local scene to grow. In addition to smaller studios such as Butterscotch Shenanigans and Upheaval Arts (developer of “StarCraft Universe,” an online multiplayer role-playing game), there are established companies like Simutronics (which released “Lara Croft: Relic Run” in 2015) and Riot Games (which makes the bestseller “League of Legends” and has a local office).
Game developers here are also eager to collaborate. Riot Games, for instance, has hosted community events with smaller studios, and Pixel-Pop has expanded from one to two days. “As PixelPop grows and as more studios start releasing more public titles, people will start realizing that games in St. Louis are a real deal,” says Mertz, “instead of something just for hobbyists.”
On August 12 and 13, gamers will flock to St. Charles’ Family Arena for MO Game Con II: The Wrath of Con, featuring “all things video games.” The event promises everything “from the classics to the current crop, 8-bit to VR.”
