Getting to know Vincent Percevault

October 25, 2019

Today we have the honor of having one of the co-founder of Native Prime in the section! He is Vincent Percevault and he works from France as part of the team in G4F, our French company. His love for computers and media has not changed a bit since he started working and he studied at the ENJMIN. But why did he choose to study in the École nationale du jeu et des médias interactifs numériques?

After studying a master’s degree in Computer Science while I was young (and had much more hair ;)), I was looking for the right course to mix my passions for Computer Science and Sound Production. The interactive media was appealing with new challenges for the interactive audio production, so I found this post-master degree and did my best to be selected.

 

When he finished his studies, he started working in Cyanide, but he did not stop right there. He founded G4F first and later co-founded Native Prime. We are really interested in knowing these first steps.

Founding G4F, called Game Audio Factory back in the days, was like a natural process. I was then the Audio Director at Cyanide in 2007, managing several projects at the same time, and getting more and more requests from other studios. So, I had to hire some colleagues to help me and also it was the right time to emancipate myself from Cyanide, even if it is still our best client, and my professional family. Patrick Pligersdorffer (CEO Cyanide) is the guy who gave me my first professional experience in this industry, I’ll forever be indebted to him!

Co-founding Native Prime has been a different approach, the localization market was evolving, publishers were looking for multilingual vendors rather than local monolingual boutique, so this is where the idea of co-founding NP with other local studios focused on quality appears, with a first meeting with Nicola, our Italian partner, at the Game Connection in 2008. It took us four years to transform a network of friendly companies to a real European group. 

 

Since he has been in the business for so many years, he had the chance to experience the evolution in the videogames localization. Let him explain how much it has changed.

This is a fast-evolving market, with product and platform cycles. I have started my career while the consoles were driving the market, with a lot of testing before the game releases, TCR & TRC were by far more difficult to obtain than today, the patch was not an option, and the delay between the master and the release was like six months. Then Nintendo launched the DS which has been a more accessible platform for developers, middleware like Unity & Unreal appeared at the same time, shortening the production cycles, securing the portages, and the mobile market has also been booming with the smartphones since then, with downloadable content, live updates, social gaming, crowdfunding, e-sport, streaming, and so many new usages. There is a lot of diversity on the market today: from big console IPs to freemium mobile games, from AAA to indie games. And this is still exciting, because the world is more accessible than ever to the developers, thanks to the web and the upcoming cloud gaming experience without platform borders… with a good multilingual localization to reach the world of course ;). The challenge for the developers is to be heard in the crowd of games launched every day.

 

He still collaborates with ENJMIN as Head of the Sound Department and he also organizes audio workshops and conference throughout Europe. Don’t miss out these pieces of advices he gave us about working in this industry.

Work hard, sweat for your passion, and if you like games, there is just no good or bad job in this industry, only opportunities to learn!


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