How Malaysian Game Development Has Leveled Up With Virtuos KL Management Mufizal Mokhtar & Johaness Reuben

Level Up KL 2022 saw a host of Malaysia’s brightest talent take the stage and give some special insight into the world of gaming, just two of these people were Virtuos Kl General Manager Mufizal Mokhtar and Technical Arts Director Johaness Reuben.

Mufizal Mokhtar worked at Ubisoft Singapore for over 10 years before returning home to lead Virtuos KL as well as creating some great sculptures with Royal Selangor. Johaness Reuben worked for 11 years as a game artist and later technical art director in the local game studio GameBrains.

Both are veterans of the local industry looking to teach and support the next generation of game developers through the recently opened Virtuos KL. Here is what they had to say in the interview.

Mobile, Console, and The SEA Gaming Market

There’s no denying that within Malaysia and the rest of South East Asia, mobile gaming is king. So to start the interview, we asked the Virtuos duo how console gaming could gain more traction in the SEA region. Mufizal started by talking about what makes the mobile market so popular as well as what they themselves are doing to bring mobile players to consoles.

“The reason why it’s big is accessibility. Everybody has mobile phones right now and what the console market is doing right now is creating a lot more accessibility to let people get into video games. So now, you see a lot of partnerships between console games and mobile games to try and get people into consoles but the biggest barrier is, of course, accessibility.”

“In my opinion, to get people to play on consoles, we just need to continue to expose them to different types of games. Consoles have a lot more processing power and you can have versions of your game on mobile and once it’s popular, you can port it over to consoles which is what we are doing as a company. What we do is we port successful games from many different types of platforms into consoles so that the people playing these games can play them on many different types of consoles as well.”

Johaness quickly corrected him, however, saying that they didn’t port games, they adapted them: “I’ll add that typically a port means taking and doing a build on another platform but we actually adapt such as going from mouse and keyboard to controller, which means a completely different UI and design, a completely new thing. That’s what we do, we come in a do the adaptation”.

Mufizal says he sees far more of these adaptations coming in the next few years, hopefully bridging the gap between mobile and console gamers.

Keeping Malaysian Talent In Malaysia 

A current concern in the Malaysian Gaming Industry is that many young talented developers often wish to leave to find employment in other countries. We asked them what could be done to keep talent within the country. The question was especially personal as one of those talents that left included Mufizal himself who went to work at Ubisoft Singapore.

“The topic is pretty close to my heart because I’m one of them. I left the country, but then I came back. I started my career in the video game industry in 2003 and Jo [Johaness] was the one that actually hired me. I worked in the local video game industry for about five years but there wasn’t a lot of opportunity out there.”

“I had no choice but to leave the country to expand my knowledge. Most of the time, people leave because they’ve hit a ceiling and they cannot learn anymore, there’s nowhere to go, and there are no more opportunities in Malaysia for people to better themselves and bring their careers to the next level. That’s what I had to do; I had to leave Malaysia to find more things to learn outside of Malaysia.”

He believes that the way to keep talent, and what Virtuos KL is ultimately trying to do is to give young Malaysian developers those opportunities that will allow them to progress further in a AAA Studio.

“You can grow within Virtuos KL as you’ll be given the opportunity to work on international brands and on complex projects that push your creativity and encourage you to grow as a game developer.”

He also pointed out that Virtuos KL is just one of 16 different regional Virtuos offices around the world and that they have a system called “missions”. This means that if you work for Virtuos KL, you’ll then get the opportunity to work in other offices in other countries. This allows developers to work outside of the country without fully disconnecting from Malaysia. They can obtain new experiences and add to their skill set while still staying in touch with home.

Preventing Crunch Culture

There are many other problems plaguing video game development and one of them is crunch culture. There have been several notable cases over the years of developers being overworked so we thought to ask what Virtuos found to be the most effective way of preventing crunch.

“When you work in a creative industry, sometimes there will be times when people will be extra passionate about delivering the highest quality possible. There are repercussions to that because sometimes, people do get burnt out, and they do get tired. I think the best way to make sure people don’t get burnt out is to make sure you plan the production properly, ahead of time. You need a very strong production team, and a very strong project management team to make sure it does not happen in the first place. You know what they say, prevention is better than cure” says Mufizal.

He does however point out that sometimes a crunch is inevitable and when that happens, you need to compensate people accordingly either with time or money.

“What usually frustrates people is when time is taken away from them. For example, when I’m taking away your time to do my stuff, that’s when you feel frustrated because I want my own time, I want to spend time with my family, I want to spend time with my friends, I want to do my own stuff but I have to work and do stuff for you instead.”

“In order to do that [complete the project] though, sometimes crunch is inevitable, not just in video games but in every creative production process, there will be a time when you’ll need to push the boundary a bit. Unfortunately, when it does happen, the best way to make them feel better about it is to give them back the time that we’ve taken away from them. So, we can do that by giving them extra time off so that they can rest after the overtime or you compensate them with extra pay for the time that they have given. I think that is the best way to do it. Prevent it, and if you cannot prevent it, then compensate them and give them back the time.”

On top of that Johaness emphasized that they always tried to monitor each employee’s mental health and that they should feel safe to talk or complain to the higher management about any concerns they are having.

“We constantly monitor people’s mental health. We’re always engaging with them and seeing if things are okay. It’s not purely about whether they are able to work but where they are as a person”.

Education

Video game development, of course, starts with education. As such we questioned the Virtuos management on if they thought Malaysian schools would soon adopt subjects like computer science as subjects. According to Johaness, they already have:

“I’ve just met a school that has digital science and natural science starting from Form 1 of lower secondary. If you saw a whole bunch of kids in uniforms running around [Level Up KL 2022], it’s that school. I spoke with the lady [in charge of the kids] and we spoke for a bit. They’re already starting this subject, it’s already happening, and this would definitely get better over time.”

Mufizal however says that while it will happen, you don’t need to do comp sci to become a game developer.

“The short answer is yes. But when it comes to video game development, I think you can apply your life experience to make video games. You don’t have to be a computer scientist to be a game developer, you could be a physicist, you could be an artist. You can be a person that really likes Lego blocks or be an architect.”

“In the future and it’s coming fast I think people will need to understand how technology works in order for them to adapt and express their creative freedom. Back in the 1500s, if you want to express creative freedom, you needed to understand how oil paintings worked, you needed to understand how brushes worked. Nowadays, we think that’s traditional but back then, that was considered cutting-edge. We may think that they are traditional but I still think that brushes and oil painting are technology and coming forward today, brushes and oil paintings are computers.”

Parents and Video Games

Connecting to education, we asked if they were seeing Southeast Asian parents’ attitudes to video games and video game development as a career change. Back in the day, we all heard the famous “video games will rot your brains” line but with how ubiquitous the medium is, that has to have changed right? According to the two developers, it thankfully seems to be changing.

 “I think so,” says Mufizal. “I think people start to see video games as a viable career choice because the convergence is happening really quickly. I see my friends who are parents early on in their child’s life asking their children questions like “Why are you spending so much time playing video games? Today, they’re like “what kind of games can they play? What kind of games can they play to learn new things and skills?”

“The attitude is definitely changing because developing video games goes beyond just playing games. It’s a study of life, it’s a study of human behavior, it’s a study of many many things. People are coming to understand that video game development is just as important of a career out there and are becoming more open to their kids starting out in this industry.”

Johaness also says that this change is again thanks to the accessibility of mobile games, noting that “It’s taken 30 years for my mum to figure out what I do but now she knows because she hears video games and says “oh, you mean like Candy Crush?” You find even those who are not gamers, they may be accountants in their 50s suddenly going like “now I understand what this is” and when their kid says “I wanna learn this”, they already know. That has really bridged the information gap and I believe that’s accessibility. It has really helped the younger generation of gamers to grow while also bringing the older generation back in. I strongly believe the future of video game development is bright!”

The Challenge of Finding New Media

We ended our interview by asking Mufizal and Johaness what challenges the Malaysia Video Game industry currently faces. The two said that currently there weren’t many big challenges the industry really faced, at least not compared to a few years ago. They did however say that they would like for local Malaysian-made games to be more present in the media.

“There are a lot of people making really great games but there aren’t enough platforms for them to show off their games. We have a lot of media channels, we have radio channels, and we have national television and I truly hope that these media will start to understand the importance of the video game industry.”

“When I was in Amsterdam, Singapore, and Hong Kong, I’d be in the cinema, and Call of Duty comes up in the cinema ads. I would love for this to be the case in our local cinema, showing off our local content as well. At the end of the day, people don’t get enough visibility for these great games they’re making which then doesn’t push the games to their ultimate success.”

I should note that I have seen ads for video games like Demon Slayer: The Hinogami Chronicles and Dislyte in the Kuala Lumpur MRT trains and stations but those aren’t local titles. Perhaps seeing ads for local video games will be the next big step.

Virtuos KL

When we asked what made Virtuos KL different from all the other branches of Virtuos around the world, Mufizal told us that they’re ultimately the same however he believes in the Malaysian Games Industry’s raw talent. “I wanted Virtuos to come to KL because I firmly believe that Malaysia has the talent pool that will help further accelerate the growth of the local game development industry and economy.”

After going to Level Up KL 2022, I firmly believe that as well. Walking through the halls of the main conference room, I was treated by so many enthusiastic developers sharing a number of creative and innovative titles, some I was familiar with others I’d never heard of but am now very excited to play more of. If this is what we have to look forward to, Malaysia’s gaming industry certainly is bright.

We thank Mufizal Mokhtar and Johaness Reuben from Virtuos KL for taking the time to speak with us in this interview and wish them to best of luck on their future projects.

For more information on Virtuos KL, check out our coverage of Mufizal Mokhtar’s talk on ‘Why Game Developers Matter For Our Digital Future’.

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