Where is the central gaming hub of America? What cities and states would you name? The ‘gaming mecca’ if you will. Would you say San Francisco? Seattle? Los Angeles? New York? Maybe even Dallas? With the new tax incentives coming out of Louisiana for game developers, you may even say a city in that state. But one state in particular, involving 3 different cities all coming together to produce a central ‘triangle’ of technological and gaming innovation, is rising fast. Dare I say, at Epic speed.
North Carolina, along with the three cities of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill have formed that so called Triangle, and is now one of the fastest growing areas for game development. And that’s not just in the U.S., that’s in the entire world. Say what?
Courtesy of The Escapist:
“The Triangle has one of the largest concentrations of game development companies in the U.S., with more than 30 studios and over 1,000 game industry workers in a metropolitan area of around one million,” says Alexander Macris, CEO and Publisher of The Escapist and President of the Triangle Game Initiative (TGI), the region’s rapidly growing cadre of videogaming power elite.
“Gamers will recognize the vast majority of local North Carolina companies … that support TGI,” says John Farnsworth, Studio Director of Atomic Games (and a Director of TGI). “EA, Epic, Red Storm Entertainment, Emergent, Vicious Cycle, Insomniac, Atomic Games, Virtual Heroes, Lockheed Martin, Nvidia, IBM, American Research Institute and Applied Research Associates, [and] there are many more companies starting up.”
Who knew, eh? This is news to me. All of the facts in the Escapist article are very interesting to read and sound exciting for the future of game development. Including the cost of living, which is very low compared to Seattle, L.A. and San Francisco. It’s got to be very tempting for companies to set up shop out there. East Coast is coming up! Now if we could only lower the cost of living on the West Coast…
The Gamer Report 