MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Mad Max director George Miller has acquired the rights to Brendan McNamara’s new game Whore of the Orient.
Former Krome and Team Bondi employees will be working on the new project at the filmmaker’s studio Kennedy Miller Mitchell Interactive.
McNamara, who will be hoping to rebuild his reputation after the Team Bondi crunch scandal, recently called Whore of the Orient, a nickname for China’s Shanghai, “one of the great untold stories of the twentieth century”.
The new studio is hoping for increased incentives and support from the Australian government to start work immediately on Whore of the Orient and movie tie-in Mad Max 4: Fury Road.
“With the government’s support we can immediately go forward with two games,” KMM co-founder Doug Mitchell told Financial Review.
“It’s not immediately obvious but the potential in the video games sector is massive. Just from the statistics people are showing me, it’s a $60 billion industry fast-tracking towards $90 billion.
“Films are very expensive, so studios are making drastically fewer of them. They’ll make ten films where they used to make 20. So, instead, people are drifting to game acquisition because of the budgets.
“The cost of a film may be $170 million – twice that to market it – whereas the basic cost of making a game might be 10% of that.
“Look at L.A. Noire, they sold about 3 million units in a week, about $135 million net revenue, off a cost base which was infinitely lower than even your average low-budget film.”
Whore of the Orient currently has no release date.
