Computer games and video games are big business. The Wall Street Journal published "Minecraft Hits Mother Lode for a Small Swedish Company" by Matthew Lynley on Monday February 4, 2013 (p.B1). The computer game Minecraft, created by Markus Persson in 2010 when he was in his 30's, has sold 20 million copies. His company, Mojang A.B. in Stockholm, earned $90 million on revenue of $235 million last year. His company employs only 29 people. That is a lot of profit from a few people.
Video games and computer games are created by programmers. I said in an earlier post, "Without domain knowledge, programmers either learn more programming minutia, or learn new languages, or write computer games." There are successful software game companies in the DFW metroplex.
One of the creators of the game Words With Friends is Paul Bettner, a McKinney resident, who started a company, Newtoy Inc., in McKinney with his brother Dave after working at Microsoft. Id Software, the creator of the game Doom, is headquartered in Richardson, Texas.
If people are going to create video games, I'd rather they do it in the Dallas metroplex than in Stockholm. The Texas Young Programmers Project can contribute to creating the pool of skilled computer programmers necessary to grow DFW into a center for game development.
The money from successful software companies can spill over into other business enterprises. Armadillo Aerospace was started by John Carmack from Id Software. Mark Cuban sold his software company, Broadcast.com, and invested in the Dallas Mavericks, among other things. In 2011 the Mavs won the NBA championship. Software entrepreneurs can be a source of synergistic economic growth to a community, so we should encourage and support software entrepreneurhip.
Robert
This post is part of the
The Texas Software Initiative Thursday, January 3, 2013
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