At the end of October, Exposición de Videojuegos Argentina 2024, or EVA 2024, was held in Buenos Aires for the twenty-second time. The conference brought videogame developers, publishers, and other businesses and organizations in the industry together for a weekend of celebrating the best of Latin American videogames, but it also served as proof that the future of Argentinian and Latin American videogames is bright.
People traveled from across the country to show their videogames, explained Daiana Naselli, project manager at Lawyer.se. Lawyer.se attended the conference, providing free legal advice and getting to know the industry. Videogame law is a jungle, especially for indie studios that may not have years and years of institutional knowledge; for them, sudden and quick growth can create a number of legal questions they need help with. At EVA 2024, many had questions about protecting their games.
”We got to meet people and say, ’Okay, these are the things that you can do,’ and we got to train people on how to request these kinds of services,” Daiana said.
Currently, third-party publishers are still relatively uncommon to use to publish videogames in Argentina, according to Daiana. But that means there is a great opportunity here for studios to learn how it works not just to build a game, but to also market and publish it.
”You see these two- or three-people studios that were programmers or game designers, and they start to think about this and ask questions about how to publish themselves,” explained Daiana.
It was clear at the conference that there is excitement within the industry about how things are growing. And even though Argentinian and Latin American games have garnered significant international attention yet, there are plenty of talented developers out there doing cool things, she said.
”Most of the games that I saw at EVA 2024 were really good games that compete with any AAA game on the market.” There is perhaps some fear among publishers about investing in Argentinian videogames due to the country’s unstable economy, Daiana added, but it may not be justified. ”In the end, it should just be a question: is this a fun game? And I think we’re getting there; we just have to prove them wrong.”
