(Source: Greater Baton Rouge Business Report)
Dane Caro founded Ecliptic Entertainment in 2008. He has yet to take advantage of the generous tax breaks the state has available for digital media companies like his, even though the incentives were a big part of why the company was started in the first place.
His studio provides several services, including 3D modeling, animation and game programming. He might contract out for certain projects, but his is as small as a small business gets.
“Right now, it’s really just me,” he says.
Caro might work alone, but he’s not the only digital media shop in town.
There’s Digital FX, which creates animation and visual special effects; Nerjyzed Entertainment, a PC and console game developer; and Yatec Games, which creates games and offers 3D animation and other services. The Baton Rouge Area Chamber counts about a dozen such companies in the Capital Region, which amounts to little more than a blip in the overall economy. But local officials hope Caro will have a lot more company in the near future.
“Digital media … will be the single biggest growth industry in Louisiana in the next 20 years,” Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Stephen Moret says.
Last year, the Legislature enhanced the state’s digital media incentives, which now include a 35% tax credit on production labor and 25% on production spending; there is no sunset provision. Moret expects digital media to become several times larger than the state’s much-hyped film industry, which supports 3,000 to 6,000 jobs statewide and also benefits from generous incentives.
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Louisiana’s core industries, like petrochemical manufacturing, are not expected to add many jobs over the long term. So LED launched a Blue Ocean Strategy to identify sectors with high growth potential in which the state has a legitimate chance to compete. Digital media, which encompasses everything from video games and education software to cyber security and mobile computing, is one of those sectors.
BRAC, along with LSU, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and the city-parish, formed the Baton Rouge Area Digital Industries Consortium in 2007, which in turn made the first contact with industry giant Electronic Arts. That relationship, with help from LED and Gov. Bobby Jindal, led to Baton Rouge’s landing EA’s first North America-based game testing center in 2008.
The initial investment was modest, producing about 20 full-time jobs and lots of part-time work for LSU students who are paid to play video games. But having EA Sports and Baton Rouge in the same media reports gives the city a measure of credibility in the industry.
If the base of small and medium-size companies, that helps make the case for further investment by larger companies, including EA. On Dec. 7, Firebrand Games, a Scottish company known for its Nintendo racing games, announced plans for a new studio at the Louisiana Technology Park that could eventually employ 30 people. Knapp says the chamber is in contact with three other high-probability prospects of a similar scale.
Knapp says prospective companies always want to know about the area’s workforce, which means “Education is everything to this strategy.”
BRAC says about 3,100 people work in digital media within an hour’s drive of Baton Rouge. That number could increase with help from the new Mentorship Academy, at which high school students can incorporate digital media into their studies; Baton Rouge Community College, which offers courses in video game programming and design; and LSU’s AVATAR Initiative.
“In 10 years, computer science will be as fundamental to a university education as English,” says Stephen Beck, who directs the AVATAR program. “It’s a tool you have to have.”
More than 30 students signed up to pursue a digital media minor in the program’s first year, he says. The program brings together faculty from areas as diverse as computer engineering, art, English and music. Beck says LSU is “very interested” in creating a postgraduate digital media degree.
“The whole point of digital media is that it is interdisciplinary,” he says. “It’s really about how these things intersect with one another.”
“We need to see the LSU programs ready and delivering talent yesterday,” Knapp says. “They have to get to the point where they’re delivering a major and a master’s degree program.”
Industry insiders say the word is spreading about Louisiana’s generous incentives, but plenty of states have their own programs. Economic development officials and the state’s companies have to sell the state itself and convince outsiders Louisiana is not some uneducated, hurricane-plagued backwater, but a place where a knowledge-based business can thrive.
Greater New Orleans Inc. CEO Michael Hecht says Louisiana has three main advantages: the incentives, a relatively low cost of doing business and a unique culture. In an industry driven by creative professionals, an interesting, inviting culture can be a selling point.
That’s great for New Orleans, which has an internationally renowned music scene and nightlife. Lafayette also cultivates a unique sense of place, and it has one of the nation’s largest municipal fiber networks. So if a company decides to locate in Louisiana, why should it choose Baton Rouge?
“You’re selling the Baton Rouge area short to say that it doesn’t have a competitive quality of life,” Knapp says.
He touts the region’s population of more than 750,000 people, access to the outdoors and the arts, and urban hub within the culturally unique environment of south Louisiana. Companies in this industry are succeeding all over the country in markets similar to Baton Rouge, Knapp says, not just obvious cities like Los Angeles and New York.
Baton Rouge has the strongest pipeline of technology graduates in the state, thanks to LSU, Moret says, adding the LSU connection probably is the city’s strength. Beyond video games, he says a business-oriented market like Baton Rouge could do well with business-process software.
New Orleans and Baton Rouge aren’t necessarily in competition, Hecht says, adding the two cities can function as one economic region, similar to San Francisco and San Jose.
“The talent that exists in both cities can go between cities for jobs,” Hecht says. “We tend to generally work together on these efforts.”
Baton Rouge has a lot of work to do if it wants to compete with the other cities in North America that are chasing the digital media industry. EA would provide a major boost if it built a studio here. The workforce situation is critical, although the Louisiana FastStart custom training program can be part of the pitch for certain prospects [related story, page 20].
And a lot of attention would be focused on Baton Rouge, Caro says, if a local studio produced the next Halo or World of Warcraft. But it doesn’t take a massive investment to make an impact; today, a studio with a relatively small team and budget can create a smartphone application like Angry Birds, which addicts procrastinators around the world.
“For a small company like mine,” he says, “that’s our best opportunity right now.”
Publish Date:
12-16-2010
