Why is there a Japanese game in the Made in Singapore category for the Digital Life Readers’ Choice Awards?

Disclaimer: The writer of this article is in a long-term relationship with someone from one of the nominated companies of the Digital Life Readers’ Choice Awards 2014’s Made in Singapore games list. However this relationship in no way affected what has been written in this article.

What makes a game ‘Made in Singapore’? Is it where its IP originated? Or was it where it was copyrighted? Would you have to consider where it was actually developed in?

These are questions that came to mind when I found out Brave Frontier, the leading game in the Made-In-Singapore category for a Readers’ Choice Award hosted by Singapore’s national newspaper, was originally developed in Japan.

Brave Frontier was developed by a Japanese mobile gaming studio called Alim last year and launched as the studio’s first mobile offering. According to The Bridge, Brave Frontier even became Japan’s top overall app in August 2013.

At the same time, Gumi Asia has been described as being the “Singapore-based developer for the game” in a Straits Times article that also claims Brave Frontier is a “Made-in-Singapore game”. (In case the link is down, please see replicated article here.)

Japan-based Gumi Ventures was one of three entities that brought Alim studio to life, the other two being Fuji Startup Ventures and B Dash Ventures. Gumi later incorporated Alim studio as a subsidiary.

The game in question.

But as far as I’m concerned, Brave Frontier is not a game made in Singapore, because it wasn’t actually made here. Singapore-based Gumi Asia only localized and published the global English iteration of Brave Frontier. Although the Gumi corporation may own Alim studio, it was still not Gumi themselves who made the game, and it doesn’t change the fact that the game was made in Japan.

In a phone call with Games in Asia, CEO of Gumi Asia David Ng said that additional development work had been done by the Singapore studio, with a team of fifteen engineers and many more staff working to implement exclusive global content as well as new features unique to the global version. He also said that the Singapores studio had contributed artwork for the Japanese iteration, and that everything for the global game is done separately from Japan.

Ng finished up by saying that he thought Brave Frontier’s qualification for the Digital Life Readers’ Choice Awards were wholly dependent on an individual’s definition of what makes a ‘made in Singapore’ game, but added that Games in Asia should probably check with the organizers for the Readers’ Choice Awards.

So we did. Digital Life is the tech supplement of Singapore’s national newspaper, and the organizers of the Digital Life Readers’ Choice Awards, the nation-wide competition for Singapore’s favourite tech, gadgets and games from 2013.

A showcase of one of the award categories.