RSS Feeds
|
US Edition
Babblebaby
|
Defamer
|
Gizmodo
|
Kotaku
|
Lifehacker
Crayon Physics Deluxe, last year's Seumas McNally Grand Prize winner at the Independent Games Festival, hits PCs tomorrow, developer Petri Purho emailed to let us know.
The former director of the Games Developers Conference, Jamil Moledina, used his appearance at the Japanese CEDEC 2008 conference to speak out about industry plans for in-game advertising.
No longer required to put a positive spin on things, Moledina showed research that suggested in-game ads could not provide enough revenue to support AAA-level titles, only casual games.
Worse, Moledina said that his advertising contacts were finding it difficult to convince clients that games could provide enough exposure compared to advertising on the web.
Sadly, Moledina didn't take issue with the main problem with in-game advertising - the way it makes disbelief harder to suspend than an elephant in a hammock.
Moledina pours scorn on in-game ads and digital distribution [Develop]
Sad news. Think Services' Jamil Moledina - the Event Director behind the Game Developers Conference - has today announced his resignation from the company. Moledina will be off to pursue "other interests". It's a big loss for the event, because the guy had a lot of passion for the job, and was really the driving force in turning GDC into one of the premier events on the gaming show/expo calendar. He'll be succeeded by Think Services' Meggan Scavio. All the best, Jamil!
[Image]
A few months ago, Kieron Gillen sat down with Paul Barnett, EA Mythic's Creative Director, and has been posting bits and pieces of that interview session ever since; this week, we were treated to one of the best cynical descriptions of GDC ever. Barnett explains why, despite being asked to go, he declined the chance to go to GDC and went to the LIFT futurism festival instead:
Blizzard's senior VP of game design Rob Pardo revealed at the Paris Game Developers Conference that World of Warcraft was originally intended to be a free-to-play, advertising supported MMO. Pardo said, reacting to the impact of free MMOs in Asia on WoW's success, that "market conditions" forced them to realise that a subscription based model was the way to go.
Danc at Lost Garden has a blast from the past up, in the form of a snip from a talk given by Dani Bunten Berry on good design elements for multiplayer games (all the way back in 1997). It's quite a list, but just goes to show that a lot of good design elements are pretty timeless.
Posted by Logan Booker at 5:15 PM on February 5, 2008
The Game Developers Association of Australia will be hosting a private function for CEOs and investors during this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The aim of the event is to provide high-level decision makers the chance to get involved in the Oz games industry, and if we can make it tantalising enough, ink a few deals.
Says GDAA CEO Greg Bondar:
GDC is a world class event and an important event on the Australian game developers’ calendar and GDAA will be making the point to all international investors, publishers and game developers that making games is a serious business in Australia.It's great to see that Australia will be representing at GDC 2008. When you take into consideration what Auran's Graham Edelsten had to say about the lack of overseas investment in local game developers, anything to boost confidence or provide some knowledge on the matter is a good thing.
A press release-looking thing after the jump.
The Game Developers Conference folks emailed to let us know that David Jaffe will be keynoting the Game Career Seminar, giving a talk entitled "From Grunt to God to Startup: Career Lessons from the Edge of Game Development."
Jaffe plans to talk about his career path which lead him from Twisted Metal to God of War to Indie start-up. Full release on the jump.
Crytek GnbH will be showing off their CryENGINE 2 and Sandbox 2 game editor on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 at this year's Game Developers Conference.
The company will also be showing how a computer that can be made for less than $US 600 can run their fully-optimised engine. I suspect that might, just might be because of their PC-crushing game Crysis. It will be interested to find out what sort of tweaks they did to the engine to get it to run on the 360 and PS3, and more importantly if they tweaked each version differently to help play to their individual strong suits.
Epic Games plan to demonstrate the latest Unreal Engine 3 features at this year's Game Developers Conference next month. The presentation will run on the half hour for each day of the show.
The Epic folks will also be speaking at two sessions:
"Automating Regression Discovery: Finding the Wrenches in the GEARS OF WAR," will be presented by Martin Sweitzer, programmer, Epic Games. This intermediate-level lecture, to be held Wednesday, February 20, 12:00-12:30, in West Hall Room 3004, will be geared toward programmers, although production and management may also benefit from the talk."UNREAL TOURNAMENT 3 Postmortem: ULTRA KILL!" will be led by Dr. Michael Capps, president, and Jeff Morris, producer, Epic Games. This postmortem, to be held Friday, February 22, 2:30-3:00 p.m., in West Hall Room 2001/2003, will cater to all developers, regardless of experience.
I hope they delve a bit into the whole Playstation 3 Unreal modding. It seems like it should be getting a lot more attention than it is.
