GDC Europe / Gamescom / GDC Austin Report
by Darko Milivojevic, VP, Industry Development, Interactive Ontario
Over the next year I will be attending many of the Game Developer Conferences that take place around the world. The conferences are the world’s largest professionals-only game industry event presenting keynote addresses, lectures, panels, discussions, and sessions.
For the purpose of this article I will be focusing on two of the more recent conferences: GDC Europe and GDC Austin.
GDC Europe was a three-day event with 130 speakers, over 40 exhibitors and more than 250 media representatives. GDC also crossed over with Gamescom Expo which had 245,000 visitors and 458 exhibitors from 31 countries making it one of the largest games trade fairs in the world. All meetings at Gamescom must be pre-arranged. It is very difficult to have meetings with companies simply by walking up to their booths.
This was the first time that GDC Europe was held in Cologne, Germany with an average attendance of around 1500 visitors.
By comparison, GDC Austin which was a four-day event (one day for developers only) had 230 speakers, over 75 exhibitors/sponsors and over 350 media representatives.
Attendance was slightly down from last year at GDC Austin, to 17.000 visitors however we did see a large increase in iphone / smartphone and social game developers at the conference.
Some of the main takeaways that I got from the two conferences were:
Cloud computing will become important for developers as it will drive costs down and time to market will decrease.
Until game developers become experts in business strategy and develop a strong distribution network they will still need publishers, regardless of the distribution method.
The kids’ market needs to be addressed at the level of a child’s development, furthermore outside influences will strongly affect the games kids play.
Reclassification of “Gamers” is desperately needed, especially as we see the blur between casual and hardcore through various social games.
Developers and publishers need to take a closer look at gamer trends if they want to keep their audience happy. ie: what other games will someone playing my game pick up or have played. If we understand the style of game they tend to play then maybe we can create a better game they will want to play.
Let’s look at the above takeaways in more detail below.
GDC Europe - Musing About Clouds: How Cloud Technology Will Affect Game Developers and the Games Industry
This session was presented by Denis Dyack from Silicon Knights (Ontario company) and was attended by many from across the industry.
The presentation implied that cloud computing will speed development as hardware will not be a critical factor. Furthermore, costs of development should drop.
Dyack went on to say that as manufacturing moves more toward digital delivery it will be easier to bring games to market. There will be many clouds out there to interact with - Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo could have their own to clouds offer.
Even though these changes will not happen overnight, it should lead to the end of consoles and better, cheaper and more widely available games.
GDC Europe - Why have a Publisher for iPhone Products?
The speakers for this session where: Bob Wallace (Strategic Alternatives), Alan Yu (Ngmoco), Sergei Gourskiof (Subatomic iPhoneStudios), Joe Wee (Chillingo) and Michael Schade (CEO & Co-Founder, FISHLABS Entertainment GmbH)
For the session/roundtable they opened up the floor for Q&A as the group of speakers discussed various aspects of publishing and iPhone products.
To generalize, there were various valid arguments to have publishers for iPhones.
These included:
- Publisher contacts (to market the game properly)
- Price point (what price to sell at? Based on experience 99 cents? $5?)
- Access to a team that can offer valuable industry research. Examples of what has worked within games, what does not work and why.
There were a few examples of cases where some games did not need publisher help and got picked up by the masses, but with an average of 2000 games being released a week, developers will need the edge in this growing market.
GDC Austin - Reaching A New Demographic: Kids AND Their Parents
The Panelists for this Q/A were, Matthew Schwartz (Senior Designer on Fusion Fall, Cartoon Network), Laralyn McWilliams (Creative Director, Sony Online Entertainment), Jesse Schell (ETC Carnegie Mellon, Schell Games), Sheri Graner Ray (Sr. Game Designer, Schell Games), and Margaret Wallace (CEO, Founder, Rebel Monkey, Playmatics)
Some of the larger discussions were around the following questions:
Q: Does the way kids and parents interact change as age changes?
The general consensus was yes it does change as they age changes. More specifically you have to look at children in a few ways, pre and post influence. Outside influence plays a large role in how kids play games and what games they play.
Kids that are over the age of 7 (age of wisdom as Jesse Schell describes it) will tend to stay away from game avatars that make them look like kids and prefer avatars that make them look older, boys (10 -13) associate games where you die a lot as more mature.
Kids will tend to use keyboards and mice very differently than as teens. Younger kids under 10 use arrow keys; the mouse less so, they will cross arms when interacting with the keyboard. If you can interact with fewer keys, the better stated Laralyn McWilliams.
Q How important is learning something or teaching something in games for kids?
It is important, as learning is a natural process of games, parents can learn from kids as well as other way around, it is bi directional, but you will still need to have some sort of reward system in place for the child to have interest and to strive forward.
When you are making the games you really need to take a step back and review the game, are you making a game for kids or what parents want their kids to play. At a certain point kids don’t want to have a game that is like school, ask yourself how do you tread the middle ground?
Q: How do you see competition
Competition is needed within games, but there are several factors that contribute to a good competitive game.
It seems to be easier to create games for boys than girls, and with parents you have to consider, do you see parents and kids together or against each other as both scenarios have their advantages. Rewards within competitive games is an important factor as well, how keenly you place emphasis on rewards? If you earn regardless of how well you do in the game, then the kids will play more, give greater rewards for accomplishing bigger tasks but don’t let the kids get too frustrated or they will leave the game.
Cooperation is an angle of competition, not many kids’ games allow cooperation. Things that have worked have had shared victories. You have to ask yourself how do I bring a family together within a competitive game so that there is some cooperation within competition.
GDC Austin - Emerging Trends in Gameplay: The Blurring Lines Between Casual And Hardcore
Speaker - Jon Radoff (CEO, GamerDNA, Inc.)
The main focus of this seminar was that what we call casual games are just as hardcore as traditional hardcore games, furthermore as tools to track games evolve we can create better silos and redefine casual / hardcore.
As we start to move away from what we see as a hardcore gamer / games (guy in the basement with snacks and alone playing for hours a day), we start to understand that there are many categories of gamers and people who play games:
- 97% of high school students surveyed have played games and are considered gamers.
- Couples play games – mmo, console
- Families – Wii, Rockband – are cross generational
- Wii in general changes what we see as far as ages
Definitions of gamers and games need to be constantly evolving, when was the last time you hear of Space Invaders being called a hardcore game? We also need to introduce new definitions for casual games.
A good example of the blur between casual and hardcore are social games. Games like Farmville and Mafia Wars, which tend to be located on gaming portal sites or within social sites like Facebook. They have a large following and a variety of people play them. Recent studies have shown that more people visit sites that have these types of games than the World of Warcraft site.
That said it is also becoming important to see what playing/buying trend gamers have, now that we can utilize better tracking techniques. From consoles to twitter, trends are emerging that show what other games people that play Call of Duty may play or pick up. This gives us the ability to further separate traditional silos like casual and hardcore games
As I stated earlier, the three days of GDC Europe overlapped with Gamescom so we had the opportunity not only to network with developers and game companies, but to meet and develop relationships with organizations from other countries, this included representatives from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Russia, France, and Holland to name a few.
Particularly strong relationships where formed at the Canada booth with Russian, French, German, Italian and Belgian representatives. This was also the first year that Russia had an official Digital Media /Video Games organization representing the country and they were very keen on learning how IO’s experiences have been, particularly working with other organizations and game developers.
It'll be very interesting to see what happens next year for GDC Europe. The focus did seem to be on the business side of the industry, but it's unclear whether it was by choice or if there simply weren't enough developer submissions. One thing I do recommend is that you plan to attend next year and if Gamescom is associated, stay the extra few days - the networking opportunities are great.
Austin on the other had gave us the opportunity to look toward our own market and emerging needs/trends. I would say that 80% of the attendees and Expo participants were US based, while 10% were Canadian and 10% were from across the world.
Interactive Ontario’s Edge Magazine spread on the Video Game industry in Ontario was distributed at GDC Austin and further to this we ended up meeting a few companies that had shown interest in coming to Ontario after hearing much about our industry and the government incentives available.
The GDC Austin Expo was not nearly the size of Gamescom but was much larger than the GDC Europe booths that were present in Europe. Items we took particular notice of; Microtransaction/card payment options for games; many companies were recruiting; not a large representation of any government group and iphone/casual game developers represented the majority of the attendees at the expo.
Overall GDC Austin had a much more robust selection of speakers and a nice expo, nestled within downtown Austin, where many of the networking functions were held. However GDC Europe was a very successful event. It gave us a perspective on Gaming from the European angle, from speakers to attendees, while highlighting and confirming the important trends/issues in development we have seen in North America.
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