Buying games has become a relatively easy process.
It’s usually as simple as a click to checkout or picking your favourite off a store shelf.
As a result, the massive amount of work that went into bringing that game to you goes completely unnoticed.
While the work of developers and publishers is relatively well documented, if you were to ask the average South African gamers about how those games were brought, distributed and marketed in South Africa you would likely be met with a blank expression.
We spoke to Ster Kinekor’s Ronelle Hendricks about this process and the challenges of bringing games to South Africa:
Bringing games to South Africa
Ster Kinekor is the official distributor for quite a few publishers in South Africa: Sony Computer Entertainment, Warner Bros Games, Bethesda Softworks and Konami to name a few of them.
“In a nutshell, we ensure that all the games our partners publish are available for our local gamers to purchase locally and are marketed effectively,” said Hendricks.
This includes price negotiation with publishers to counteract the fluctuating Rand and exchange rate.
There is also the small matter of logistics – getting the stock from Europe to South Africa and distributing it to retail channels.
“Marketing really is the fun part about this process.”
“We get to take direction from our global teams and localise it for our fans and consumers in such a way that they are drawn to our franchises and IPs.”
“We work closely with the EMEA marketing and PR teams to ensure that we have all the assets for media and to make an impact when launching the games through paid media – be ATL or BTL.”
Local restrictions
“From an operations perspective we also provide sensor code for registration with various government bodies”.
“Another key role is for us to ensure, where online play is available, that all technical parameters have been considered with publishers so as to afford consumers the best online gaming experience possible”
“Take the rAge expo for example, distributors have to start seeking approval weeks in advance to secure pre-release code or behind closed doors footage so we can show the consumers all the features of the upcoming games and getting them just as excited as we are about these games”.
“Often publishers have to prescribe to highly regulated agreements with third parties such as LEGO and marvel etc. which have their own ‘worlds’ to please which can at times seem cumbersome”.
It’s all part of the process though.”We are working in an industry that many people would love to break into, I mean, at the end of the day… it’s videogames!
Videogames are fun and we have fun marketing them, but there are a lot of legalities to consider when launching their games”.
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