twofour54's Wayne Borg

In essence the whole twofour54 project links back to Abu Dhabi's plans to become a cultural centre. The Emirates is looking to diversify away from energy so that by the year 2030, 50 per cent of its GNP will come from non-energy based sources. The city wants to position itself on culture, and that sits with Abu Dhabi because it's the national capital of the country and no one else in the region is really fulfilling that role - it wants to become the cultural centre of the region.

There are five sectors that have been identified that will strategically position Abu Dhabi to fulfil that role - aeronautics, health, education, tourism and then media and entertainment. The reason this last sector was identified is that if you look at cultural centres around the world they all have these strong commercial and creative industries - look at London, Tokyo, Berlin and New York, there's this creative vibrancy there. And from a commercial and economic standpoint we want to establish a creative hub here.

As twofour54 our role is very much about establishing content creation businesses in the region and a creative hub. We have three key areas to build that on - developing skills, providing facilities to aid the creative process and helping establish indigenous content businesses in the region. Our role is to put in place that physical and intellectual infrastructure to drive and help the creative industries ecosystem flourish. Within the education sector we'll be announcing an animation academy and a videogame academy shortly - with one of the industry leaders.

There's a tremendous talent pool in the region and there's a significant opportunity in the market - there's 320 million people on a pan-Arab basis, and 60 per cent of that population is under 25. So from an entertainment consumption standpoint it's a very sweet spot. There's very little content here - film, games, TV, online - that connects and resonates with that audience. So that's what we're here to do - help develop the content industries to meet the needs here.

Given those demographics, there's virtually none, if any, truly Arabic games. For those demographics and the size of that population there isn't a reason why we shouldn't be developing an indigenous games business here. We see the gaming sector as very important. In economic terms its probably the leading entertainment sector now, having already overtaken the music and film industries.

We're looking across the entire spectrum from casual games to MMOGs to console games. We want to encourage developers within the region who may have game ideas but not necessarily the technical expertise to get those gaming concepts up and running. And we want to work with some of the larger publishers to establish a presence here to start developing games specifically for the region.

It's very encouraging. In the current climate there's a lot of core entertainment markets are under some distress. This region hasn't been focused on by a lot of these companies and if it starts to play a greater role internationally there will be a growing awareness and recognition of a tremendous opportunity here.

The environment that we're building here in the region is supportive and condusive to the creative process. It's all good and well we attract the companies here, but if we're not attracting the creative people we're going to be dead in the water.

We're not trying to attract businesses from other parts of the world to set up here. What we're working with is companies that recognise there's an opportunity within the region. We'll work with them to help them develop and facilitate their business. And we're a tax free environment to begin with.

We're in the final stages of negotiating to establish a gaming academy here with one of the major publishing companies and that will be supported with a development studio so not only we producing graduates from the academy, it's a sustainable model where they will be able to go into a production environment and put those skills they've attained into practice. We can seed the industry here. We're getting a lot of interest from aspiring games developers in the region so we're looking to invest in their business and connect them with these publishers who have the critical mass and expertise to take those concepts and develop them into fully fledged games.