Keywords’ Tom Davies on growing in APAC and plans to attract world-class art/engineering talent to Australia/Japan
Keywords Studios is one of the largest “behind the scenes” companies in the gaming industry, providing localization, marketing, music, and development to countless studios of various sizes across the globe. Its studios have likely contributed directly to some of your favorite titles, even if you didn't know it before now.
Hitmarker recently sat down with Tom Davies, Keywords’ Head of Operations for the APAC region, to learn more about his role, the company’s studios and clients, and its decision to offer relocation and visa support for its art and engineering job opportunities in Australia and Japan for the very first time.
Hi Tom, thanks for being with us today! To begin, can you please tell us more about Keywords and its expansion into the Asia-Pacific region?
Keywords Studios is the largest outsourced provider of games services in the world. It works with 24 of the top 25 biggest game publishers, supporting them in everything from initial game concept and design to co-development, full development, QA, localization, marketing, live services, and player support. Globally, we have about 12,000 employees.
Increasingly, we are focused on growing our presence in Asia-Pacific to better serve clients in this region, particularly Japan, where some of the biggest publishers and the world’s most loved games are based.
I think there is huge potential in the APAC region to grow, and I'm very excited about the opportunities there to bring Asian games to the West and also to create games for the emerging markets within Asia.
How did you first get involved with the company?
My entire career has been working with technology, media, and gaming companies to help them grow and scale. I started my career working for telecom companies trying to bring video games to mobile devices before the iPhone was released. Then I worked in venture capital investing in mobile technologies, including gaming companies, in Australia and started working with Tantalus Media, which was the first studio that Keywords acquired in Australia.
What are your main responsibilities at Keywords, and could you highlight some of your major achievements so far?
I oversee the video game studios in the APAC region, supporting them to grow their teams and putting in place the necessary infrastructure to support our managers and staff. My main responsibility is making sure that all our employees are looked after and that we are bringing in enough work to keep them excited and motivated.
Since starting at Keywords, we have increased wages, improved working conditions, implemented health and wellness policies, put into place mental health supports, and improved working conditions for our neurodiverse employees, of which we have a lot. We have also invested more in training and upskilling our staff in new technologies and management skills.
Despite recent challenges in the industry, Keywords has continued to grow. What do you believe are the key factors behind this success?
Keywords Studios doesn’t own IP or publish games; our business model is working for publishers on their games. This diversifies our risk because if a game doesn’t do well or is unable to get funding, then we have other titles that we can work on, and it doesn’t mean we have to close the studio.
This portfolio approach means that even if projects are canceled or delayed, which is common at the moment, only a small part of our business is affected, and we can find another project for that team to work on fairly quickly.
Fortunately, for us, the market is shifting towards more and more outsourced development, and so even though the industry has been suffering, our business is growing as demand for our services is increasing.
Could you tell us about the game studios operating under the Keywords banner in Australia and Japan?
We have six game development studios in Australia and one in Japan, but we work closely together and share projects and resources across games. We do a lot of porting projects from PC to console, as well as co-development and, increasingly, full-development work. Each studio has a slightly different specialization from Unity to Unreal Engine, from being very technology-focused to more creative and design-focused.
At any one time, about 30% of a studio is working on another studio’s projects. This approach gives us greater flexibility in terms of how we staff a project and offers our staff greater choice on the projects and teams they work with. Each of the studios has a slightly different culture but shares the same core values of sustainability, integrity, people first, being the best, and collaboration.
The studios are located in Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Tokyo. Most of the studios are between 30 and 60 staff, with our largest, Wicked Workshop, having around 100. This size allows everyone to know each other and helps create a more collegiate experience.
What are some notable video game companies that the Australian and Japanese studios collaborate with?
We have worked with a lot of top-tier video game companies. In the past three years, we have mostly worked on large projects for 2K, Microsoft, Nintendo, Paradox, Sega, and Game Freak.
We have a strong relationship with Microsoft and Nintendo in particular, and we are currently leveraging our presence in Japan to grow our relationships with Japanese publishers and are hoping to do more work on some much-loved titles.
What has motivated Keywords Australia and Japan to recruit experienced international art and engineering talent for the first time?
As our studios have grown and the scale of the projects we take on has increased, we need more and more highly experienced people that have worked on AAA titles and managed large productions who understand what it takes to deliver.
In Australia, we don’t have a lot of studios where people work on those types of games, so if we want to hire people with that experience, we need to look overseas. We have always welcomed international people to Australia, and in Japan we are seeing the government open its doors to more foreigners.
At Keywords Australia, we already have a number of internationals in our teams, and in Japan, almost 70% of our team are internationals. We are also seeking expat Australians and Japanese who are returning home after years overseas and looking to continue to work in the industry.
Why should experienced professionals be interested in joining Keywords Australia or Japan?
Australia is one of the world’s most desirable places to live, with Melbourne and Sydney constantly in the top 10 best places to live. Tokyo offers a totally different experience as one of the world's great metropolises and is also a fantastic place to work. Our Japanese studio, Wizcorp, is also a fully remote employer, so you can choose where in Japan you’d like to live.
You will be working with a team of passionate, friendly, and highly experienced, like-minded professionals in flexible working conditions and supported to do your best.
Keywords offers successful candidates a relocation package and financial support to help them move and settle in. We also help manage the visa process in both Japan and Australia and pay for that.
A massive thank you to Tom for taking the time to chat with us!
Whether you’re an artist, programmer, or engineer, there are plenty of roles based at Keywords’ Australian and Japanese studios, with many more to come.
You can check out the currently available roles in Australia and Japan on Keywords' company page below.
-> Find open positions at Keywords Studios Australia and Japan
