Hey,
I just joined this forum so I'm not 100% sure if this post is in the right place but I was wondering, how are Australian developers going?
I know that Australia is not the best place to work for game development other then maybe the mobile platform.

“How are Australian developers going” is a fairly vague question and I am not sure what your objective is.
If you are looking for advice on how to get into the industry in any country, there is a forum for that.
If you want to check on the level of game-making activity in Australia, you can use GameDev Map.


L. Spiro

I would say it's bouncing back after a very hard decade of decimation. The past 5 or so years have been particularly harsh, with a huge amount of downsizing.
I've probably lost track of the number of closures - Krome (which had previously absorbed Ratbag and Melbourne House), Blue Tongue, Transmission/IR Gurus, Visceral, THQ Aus, Auran, Pandemic, Team Bondi, Perception...
The surviving console game developers that I can think of off the top of my head are Big Ant, Wicked Witch, Trickstar (the dodgy phoenix of Transmission), 2K Aus and Sega Aus.
In mobile development, Halfbrick and EA are doing really well (EA Mobile recently bought up Firemint (who recently bought up Infinite Interactive) and IronMonkey and merged them all into EA mobile, or now "EA Firemonkeys").
There's also plenty of smaller companies like Blowfish Studios, Torus, Tantalus, Voxel Agents, Microforte, etc...

Unfortunately, a huge amount of talent has been lost as veterans have given up on the instability and moved into other industries, or moved overseas to booming places like Canada (and most of the 457-visa workers sponsored by the above companies kicked out).
The personal upside of that is that I've now got friends in Crytek, Epic, Ubisoft, etc...
On the wider positive side, there's now a lot of up-and-coming indie developers. I'm personally involved with a small start-up, and some other devs have recently popped up on places like greenlight, such as orbitor or automation.