In The News

Mighty Rabbit Studios Saturday Morning RPG also shows a lot of promise especially if you grew up in the 1980s. The gameplay is standard Japan RPG fare, but the nostalgia and humor that permeates the game definitely brought a smile to my face.

In the $15 billion video game industry, it can be difficult for the little guys to get their start. Large companies producing Blockbuster games often squeeze out the young, creative computer science students who have very little chance of successfully producing and releasing a game on their own. That’s where Joystick Labs comes in.

On the gaming front, that’s something that’s good to point out because I think most people don’t know about the gaming cluster here. It’s been a really strong area for us since the early 90s: Epic Games, EA, Emergent Game Technologies, Red Storm Entertainment, they’ve all either been based here, have presences here, or were founded here. I think at last count there’s something like 30 gaming industry related companies here. One cool thing about that, too, is that the community kind of recently came together and angel funded and launched Joystick Labs, which is an incubator.

“The creation of the entity(Joystick Labs) has interesting timing. In the past, game developers were at the mercy of game publishers, who controlled retail distribution of games and could often dictate terms. The costs of game development for the consoles became so large that the publishers only backed sequels of hits or proven teams. The …

“The creation of Joystick Labs is one of the latest signs that the video game production and distribution model is changing. With the mass adoption of browser-based and mobile gaming platforms, the market is increasingly shifting its focus away from traditional retail distribution channels to digitally distributed video games that can be downloaded over the …

“Most in the game industry — and those who’d like to be in it — know that funding is the arguably the biggest challenge to an independent project. Now, a new Durham, North Carolina-based organization hopes to assist, but it’s aiming beyond the traditional model of project-based funding — Joystick Labs’ aim is to provide …