Is New York ready for a General Assembly for video games?

The problem, Collin Cummings says, is that there’s really no infrastructure for creating and building video games. Incubators, accelerators, coworking spaces, investment funds abound — but for startups.
“It sounds like a strange metaphor but the games industry is kind of like a gold rush: everyone’s trying to get in it but everyone’s pickaxes are kind of like fingernails,” Cummings said in an interview. “Indie games is a really tough business but we just want to get [game devs] better tools.”
So he’s set out to provide game developers with those tools and also some instruction on how to use them. His company is called PlayWell and it’s just a few months old. Later this month, the company is hosting an information session and in February will hold a Unity bootcamp. Cummings, who lives and works in Brooklyn, plans to open a game developer-oriented coworking space in the fall. (It’s not unlike the Philly Game Forge two hours down I-95.)
A year ago, Cummings was accepted into Google’s 30 Weeks program, which aims to help designers become founders. He’d had an idea for a mobile platform to build your own microgames and share them with friends. When he graduated the program, he was ready for the idea to take off. But, nothing happened.
“That was the moment. After I went to the program I realized I needed a better network. I got like a huge shrug and that was a huge shocker, working with a company as large as Google,” he said. “There’s gotta be a weird lack of infrastructure out there, as compared with code schools. With games it’s still weirdly archaic.”
And so into this archaic melange of gamers, artists, computer code and visual design he goes, building a kind of General Assembly for video games.

It's insane how much fear and hesitation kills opportunity. The simple gesture of acting on a spark is already a win.

— Collin, 🔜 @ Long Chile (@collin_cummings) January 14, 2016

Cummings has an interesting backstory.
The 34-year-old comes to New York by way of Utah and, before that, Los Angeles. He dropped out of Brigham Young University and started a business reselling industrial-grade restaurant equipment. He’d worked in restaurants and seen perfectly good gear go to waste when restaurants closed. He did good business reselling, but said that dealing meat slicers became depressing. He did political writing for a stint, started writing about design and then went back to school to finish with a design degree. He came to New York and worked for Squarespace for awhile, before being accepted into 30 Weeks.
“New York needs to be a [game] center, because right now it’s not great,” he said. “You go to Boston or L.A. or Seattle and there are communities. Given the amount of creative people in New York, it’s kind of insane.”