A future for all: How Brazil's multicultural industry might shape the global business | Playable Futures
Will Freeman
Tuesday 31st May 2022
Playable Futures is a collection of insights, interviews and articles from global games leaders sharing their visions of where the industry will go next. This article series has been brought to you by GamesIndustry.biz, Ukie, Sumo Group and Diva.
Today Latin America's video game sector can be found bristling with activity, success stories, and growth. Now, more than ever, it is starting to serve as a place doing much to shape the future of the global games industry. But it hasn't quite always been that way.
Brazil, for example, famously struggled to establish a market in the 1990s thanks to significant tariffs on the importing of gaming hardware. Despite the rise of a distinct generation of local clone consoles, the gaming medium's potential was effectively stifled across the country. With a modest local market and a lack of the ecosystem consistency conventional platforms bring, that era's aspiring local developers had the odds stacked against them.
Eliana Russi, Abragames
Over the years, however, Brazil in particular has emerged as something of a global gaming superpower, rising to prominence in the international industry in tandem with the wider Latin American games sector.
As of mid-2021, the country stood as the 12th largest games market globally, with a value of $2.3 billion.That positioned Brazil as the dominant leader in its home continent's games market, which is expected to total $3.2 billion by 2023. Brazil's games industry is sometimes still portrayed as emerging, but while there remains ample room for growth, it is safe to say that Brazil has already emerged and then some.
You can in fact trace the country's game development scene back to at least the early 1980s, when a handful of
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