I guess I should be happy to work in Helsinki. I mean, if there’s enough of sad, clueless pitches for new MMOs in the US games industry that someone actually finds time to create a (funny) parody like this video, I must have been spared of a lot of crap. Enjoy. :)
Nabeel Hyatt blogged about microstransactions doing well in the US. In particular, it seems MapleStory is doing particularly well in the States, probably due to the Viacom deal they’ve made. Interesting stuff.
Gamasutra reports DS and Wii are doing pretty well. February sales for hardware units:
Or, by company:
(Unfortunately there was no data on the original Xbox.) Nintendo is doing really well – deservedly. (Via /.)
And in case someone missed this in the middle of the GDC reportage, here’s a video of LittleBigPlanet. This was by far the cutest game I saw at GDC and actually the first thing I’ve ever seen on a PS3 that made me want to purchase the console. Hopefully the PS3 price will go down before this is out. ;)
What struck me the most with this game was how much fun the developers seemed to have when demoing the game to the audience during the Sony keynote.
I know this is kind of late news but had to blog this – Commodore is back in business. C64 was one of the first computers I used for gaming so I get a certain familiar comfy feeling just by looking at the logo. If I was getting a new gaming PC, I might just consider getting one of these. If not for anything else, just to make all the other games envious of me. It’s preloaded with a C64 emulator and 50 games, wonder if the four-way CPU can handle the emulation? ;P
GDC reports I found interesting:
Raph Koster, Joi Ito, Nabeel Hyatt, Matt Mihaly and Daniel James from OOO.
Web 2.0, microtransactions, casual games, virtual worlds are surfing the trend right now. The focus on talks seemed to be much more on simpler online games than massive box titles. There were lots of indirect references to Second Life and World of Warcraft but surprisingly little direct talk about either.
My talk went well. I think Daniel is reading my email since he ranted about how bad User Generated Content is as a term which was one of the highlights of my presentation. ;) From my perspective, looking at a website and just saying a site is “about UGC” is oversimplification of user motivations. Yes, on some sites the users do come to view the content being authored by other users but in many cases the driving motivation is the fact that users feel they belong to a community. In Habbo, we have a real community which adds very significant value to the user experience and is much greater a motivation to keep using the service than the content being authored.
I liked the Indie and Casual Games Summits. Of the other talks, obviously the Sony and Nintendo keynotes were interesting, but I was disappointed at both. The Free to Play, Pay for Stuff roundtables were excellent.
OOO had the best party, by far. I found out that Eric Zimmerman is a good dancer. Figures, he does martial arts as a hobby.
Biggest takeaways all came from just talking with people.
See Alice’s post on the same session for more detail. :)
Gordon Walton, Mark Jacobs, Daniel James, Mark Kern, Raph Koster,
Rob Pardo.
The Past
What’s worked well in the past? Name 1-2 games.
Daniel: Grinding has worked well, is very compelling. Elite was awesome as it was so open.
Mark: Leveling and classes don’t make sense outside the gamer context. If you sit someonw down who never played mmos it’s a hard experience.
Raph feels sometimes that we’ve only ever done two games. DikuMUD, LambdaMOO. Many, many MMOs created by a small group of guys who created these muds way back then.
The Present
We’re in an era where WoW dominates, “Post WoW times”.
Daniel: it’s interesting to see Runescape (with terrible production values) come out of nowhere and work so well.
WoW lesson: you have to work globally. Your game has to work in Europe, US, Asia. Making compatible is hard.
Message to journalists: do not ask if the market is saturated? NO. There will be another WoW. “I don’t think that’ll be Warhammer.” Polish your game, if players can use the game as a mirror, it’s good enough. :)
Raph: big lesson of WoW is to not look at WoW. There are multiple multi-million MMOs out in Europe and US right now. It’s a good thing someone forces people to thinks smart instead of thinking big.
Match your content to the advancement curve. If you have content for 100 hours, don’t make the advancement to highest level take 500 hours. It’s important your developers like playing the game, the games live for a long time and if you have to develop something because you just have to, the decisions will start to go bad.
The Future
Give 3 predictions.
Raph: #1 We’ll see a massive explosion of virtual worlds. Majority will not be box games. Project Darkstar just went open source. Club Penguin. #2 The nest big publishers will come from television and film industry. Viacom has created three MMOs in the last six monthts. They’re moving in with massive multi mullion dollars. #3 Increasingly many non-game worlds are becoming bigger. Second Life. PS 3 would not exist without SL. Tail is wagging the dog. Kaneva. Lots of SL clones coming out. User content uploads, ability to cash out, entertainment.
Mark Jacobs: #1 lots of more new types of games. Explosion of games. #2 Lots of corpses, it’s going to be unbelievable. There’s a shocking amount of money going around. Media guys running around, here’s 50 million, can you make a game like WoW? #3 Somebody will beat WoW. It’s nothing to do with how smart Blizard guys are. Someone will just hop the bar. Won’t be for a while but it will happen.
Rob: #1 Disagree with Raph, important games will not come from big media. They will make games which will not be very good. #2 There will be lots of MMOs which should not have been made MMOs at all. #3 It’s not going to be just US market anymore, think globally.
Mark Kern: #1 Our definition of MMO will change. Strong stories, strong characters etc. Boxes on shelves will not dominate the future. Asia it’s all download. #2 It’ll become really cheap to start an MMO. #3 Virtual networking?
Dan: Lots of poeple will lost their shirt #1 This media will destroy television. Awesome thing for humanity. Advertising business will migrate to this medium. #2 Social networking, games will go much more towards web than downloadble. Simple, not complicated. #3 Crazy regulatory issues. Wondering if should outshore now before the government decides Daniel is running a gambling business or something.
QA: Telcos, benefit or threat? Dan: not relevant. As long as data moves. Fiber will be good for games industry. Net Neutrality is important.
Webcans (sp?). Buy plush toy at Toys ‘r us, they have an mmo.
Raph: Xfire. Fliff. Youlgang. Silkroad online. Korean games, getting massive amounts of play time.
What is an MMO? Not a question for this session.
Justin Hall mentioned his Passively Multiplayer games idea. Got adviced he should trademark the name.
Game Publisher rant, moderated by Eric Zimmerman
(Good stuff is in the end.)
Eric’s ran similar rant session a couple times before but for developers, not publishers. Wanted to collect a couple hot-headed talkers together and see what happens. Everyone has 5 minutes to deliver a rant.
Greg Kostikyan used to be a developer ranter but given the advent of Manifesto Games, is now a publisher ranter.
Alexei Jon
“I don’t think this is as much of a rant as group therapy.”
Big rant about how Vista’s broken almost everything except for big box titles such as WoW.
“Hey, it’s an open beta so it’s ok to be broken.” All casual games broke on Vista. All big portals, Yahoo!, MS Games site, all games broke. MS addressed the problem by telling in public that’s not true. “And anyway if it’s broken it’s probably spyware.” Btw the spyware actually works fine, it’s the real applications that don’t work. Funny thing about the security code is that it just stops you from using a computer so you can’t break your computer.
Richard Hilleman
“I’m not Gordon.” People coming to the business aren’t capable of leadership. Lots of people with excellent technical skills who can code but can’t coordinate a team of three. Genius is good but if you can’t communicate and coordinate, it’s not usefull. Leadership. Insight, experience is nice but again, doesn’t help if you’re not a good leader. Everyone is either a boss of someone or has a boss. If you’re not happy with your boss, you have to tell him and insist he gets better.
Eric wondering how you get a larger room when it’s publishers speaking.
Nichol Bradford
Leadership again – games industry should take leadership of schooling in some aspects. Young adults are aiming for computer related professions. Computer profession is now more popular than being a pro athlete. “More people want to code for WoW than be Coby.” Education a major social problem. “Education is the mass social proble, not whether I bring mascara to a plane.” Applause. Math, science, art, all good for games. Buy a game, you motivate your kid. Industry responsibility to provide material for discussion on education. Kids want us, we have to take the responsibility. Do you know the power you have to address issues? Do you know what you have to give to the world? Politicians are using games to their advantage to knock down first amendment rights, are you doing something about this? “This is not an appeal for educational games… this is a rant of someone who gives a damn.” Take action! If you want to volunteer to help, contact Nicol.
Personal note: Interesting take but did sound like someone preaching to a congregation.
Eric pointing out IGDA is working out on all issues that have been mentioned. “I guess there’s nobody who can speak better for them than I… I mean perhaps someone can speak much better for them than I.” :)
Jason De La Roca
We need to diversify the games culture. Leadership is changing, it’s more about coordination and cultivation than old style dictatorial management practices. Command and control doesn’t work anymore, never worked very well for games industry.
Chris Hecker
“Of course it’s the development that has the technical difficulty.” Xbox, PS3 gives a lot more power but not better gameplay. Wii manufacturing secret: two gamecuves duct-taped together. Wii has too little power, it’s not about graphics, it’s about making games smarter. Computation is not orthogonal to gameplay. AI needs CPU. “You can’t do smart games on a piece of shit underpowered CPU.”
Hard data, references to “artform” on sites:
playstation.com 30
xbox.com 15
wii.com 0
nintendo.com 5
“Even Xbox has over 50% more art than xbox.” Nintendo guys don’t think games should be / are an artform. This is not good enough for people leading the industry. Demands for Nintendo: “1. recognize and push games as an artform, 2. make a console that doesn’t suck ass.”
Later during QA: “Which one was the anti-wii? You’re so full of shit.” The actual argument of the Wii rant was, Nintendo has no interest in making actual serious games, they’re all about simple fun.
Lee Jacobson
If he wanted to rant about something, it’s dishonest developers. The dev community at large is honest, wants to do a good job and create good games, however over the last 12 yeaas, there’s this crazy shit that turns your hair green. Will share some of the shit with the audience: theft. There was a studio that was stealing money, pocketing the cash and telling developers the publisher didn’t pay. When devs confronted the publisher, the guys skipped town with 300k. Don’t do that.
Contracted with a studio, said they owned a platform and high skill developers, instead had a second team secretly doing the game, found out after a couple the milestones the company had no idea, project terminated, lots of anger in the air.
Visited a studio with supposedly two teams. One side of building had one team, went for lunch, came back, same guys wearing different clothes on the other side of the building. There just wasn’t anything to say.
Be honest about staffing, if you can’t take the project, just really don’t take it. Everyone will tell everyone anyway, publishers are not stupid, they’ve seen all the tricks in the book.
Greg Kostikyan
Can’t blame developers. Can blame console manufacturers. Charging ridiculously for devkits. Acting as second gatekeeper after the publisher. Games industry, the closed platforms are winning. Console manuf has scary power over indie publishers. 1985, Nintendo had the worst licensing terms ever. You had to pay to get your game on the platform. Predicting next gen will have only online retail. However consoles will still remain closed systems, all distribution will go through the console manufacturer. Sony will have the _only_ distribution channel to PS4 and hence full control of the retail channel. Very little we can do about this since the publishers only look forwards for one quarter, not five years. Perhaps we’re doomed.
Phil Harrison on stage.
Speech focus on developers tools? Not.
“We’re here to talk about audience participate and emerging play.”
“Game 3.0” What is this, why relevant? Mag cover: Time mag “You are the person of the year”. Phil thought this is the great moment for the Internet economy.
Web 2.0 is not a standard, it’s a philosophy. Phil O’Reilly. Web 2.0 community strong. Doesn’t really mean anything until you lay products on the sites, shareing collaborating.
Start a moment on what this means for the games industry
Game 1.0: disconnected console. Cartridges. Game contained in a piece of plastic.
Game 2.0: online games, static gamme contet the on the disc.
Game 3.0: online content. Social Interaction, content creation, powered insights, emergent entertainment, creativity.
IMO a bit lame attempt at trying to leave a mark into history by coming up a new term. Version numbers are so last… version? Will not use the term anywhere.
First thing being shared: All PS3 players will have a HOME. Cute logo. New Icon on the cross media bar. Home.
Scott, producer of Home coming to stage. Tech issues. Wrong controller, screen blinking.
Going to the Home Universe. Central Lounge, you can navigate through. Cool looking place, customizable avatar. Virtual PSP. Purchasable clothing. When you buy games, you get more clothes, games can unlock content.
3D community, social networking. You can customize the face of the character details. Presets, large variety of different face presets available.
Back to ome centra lounge. HD video can be shown inside the 3D space. All visualization
Other users are onloine. Multiple different chatting methods. Quickchat. Virtual keyboards. Sai Ho instead of Hi. :) Voice chatting.
More lounges, bowling alley, pool tables. Televisions with demos everywhere. Arcade cabinets. Smooth transitioning between modes of gaming etc.
Own Private Apartments. You can invite people using friend list in the virtual PSP. Tricking out the apartments. Changing wallpapers. Can sit on furniture. All functionality avaiable. You can download additional furniture. Limited edition items from games. Physics based placement of furni. All content from hard drive avalable in Homes, you can put your photos to the walls and everyone will see this.
User Created Content. Demo, takes photo of audience and puts memory stick into PS3, puts photo to the wall. Uses wrong machine so picture doesn’t come up. :)
Showing other apartment that’s “!more tricked out”. Cool looking, pool table. Nice lighting! People having a party outside. Music and video can be streamed to people in the world.
Physics demo, throws tv down the stairs. Movie running on the screen while model moves. Really uses the PS3 horsepower. “Look, Bravias are reliable even in virtual worlds.”
Showing room with movie trailers running on walls. Impressive looking, very, very high image quality all over.
“Home is not just about Sony brands and games.” Will allow other brands to come to the world. Sports Lounge demo. Users Maya to build the models. Any surface can have video, HTML, other media. Reuse existing content easy.
Overall feeling – looks like a sterile, polished Sony-world. Not very exciting. Makes me think of Second Life, except looks nicer and is easier to use. Linden should maybe be worried. Will be packed full of people having cybersex, will be interesting to see what Sony does about this.
Hall of Fame, new Playstation network feature. Features trophies you’ve collected from games, you can get them from games, put to the hall of fame, get your friends into your HoF, show how much you’ve played. Can reuse game content as trophies, will be easy for developers to add to games, SDK available. Showing a massive space with tons of trophies inside.
Public and private spaces for everyone user. Will have pets. Will get more sophisticate content. Public beta begins April 2007, Service autumn 2007.
Singstar
New online functionality for Singstar. New songs, you can chat with other players, see profiles of users. See which songs people are singing. See comments on your performances. SingStor, get more content. Video stream previews of songs, streamed from server. Add songs to cart, purchase. Songs download on the background. You can record your performances, including video, upload to the community and have people comment on your performances. Coming out in May-June in US. Not being said but content availability subject to record label deals so Europeans will be fucked.
Playstation Edge. New core technologies, shared to all developers. Two core components: GCD Replay, get best of out the graphics chip. SPU Geometry processing libraries, get the best out of the cell chip.
Another brand new product: Little Big Planet game. Showing same developers old content. Rag Doll Kung Fu. Media Molecule game company, new company by the RDKF guys.
New game all about creativity. Level creation. Empowering players. Shwoing a cute little character called Sackboy. Add stuff, all made of “real materials”. Real physics. Adding stuff to the level. Balls, tree, wheel that rotates like real. Stickers. Put any image you have onto the levels from the HD. Very cute graphics.
Adding grass, flowers. Everything is highly interactive, very tactile.
Showing a pre-made level. You can grab objects, including other players. Showing how to solve puzzles using the physics. Cooperative puzzle solving. Looks amazing. I’m staring the screen mouth open because this is so cool. Amazing. Makes me want to get a PS3. Coming out in early 2008.
Attended the Casual Cash Cow? session by Eric Zimmerman, part of the Independent Games Summit
Eric’s the co-founder and CEO of Gamelab, a New York -based games company and an all-round nice guy. He’s also a great speaker, if you ever have the chance, I recommend you go and listen to him. As an added bonus he usually makes the audience do things.
Huge echo! Eric’s wondering if that’s just in his head. :)
What are independent games? What does the term really refer to? It’s all up in the air. The summit’s been exciting to Eric.
Eric’s a game designer, been in the businesss for 13 years. Founder of Gamelab, professor, writer, advocate, co-author of two excellent books.
Gamelab has grown steadily, organically. Nice-looking pictures from the office.
Showing a reel of games, partially new stuff that’s not out yet.
Out Of Your Mind, a new game that looks awesome. Arcadia, you play four minigames simultaneously. Diner Dash, obviously. Egg vs Chicken. Plantasia gardening game, light sim game. Shopmania, parody of mass market. Lego Fever. Subway Scramble action puzzle game. Junkbot, lego puzzle game. Blix, first game Gamelab ever did. Loop, second game they did. Lego World Builder. Transformers. Gamgs of GDC. New Gamelab website.
www.gamelab.com
Going through history of the company: business models of Gamelab.
Started with Blix. Completed for Independent games festival. Blix got picked by Shockwave.com. A success story from independent festival. Before the internet bubble burst.
Staff Authorship. If you want to grow beyond two or three people, you have to operate in certain ways, just having passion is not enough. Priority for any creative company. People have to feel the work is their work. Doesn’t work if people just clock in and out. You can’t fake it, people really do need to be in control. Financial incentives are necessary but no sufficient.
Invent challenges. Peter Lee talks to people all the time, making sure there’s interesting stuff happening for everyoine at all time. People can shuffle roles.
This is scary and not easy. You have to let people make mistakes or they won’t learn. There’s no creative director, no “vision director” for projects. Nobody’s there to say if something is good or bad. People start to collaborate in this type of environment, everyone is desperate for feedback at all times. :)
Low hangong fruit: web games. Using Loop as an example. All companies should focus on something, can be a business model, content, anything. Can’t focus on all, a company needs to focus on something. Gamelab decided to focus on content, especially on gameplay that provides new experiences for players. Each game needs to have something new and innovative.
Gamelab has massive amount of games at the office. Showing photos of a massive stack of boardgame boxes. They have all the consoles, lots of games.
Staff should have rich lives outside the company. One of the programmers is a DJ. Someone does sculpture.
Culture = daily experience of your staff. Research is the key to innovation. Design your company culture. What kind of a company are you going to make? When running a company, you have to decide that right from the beginning. The games happen as a result of your company culture.
Employees are always reimbursed for purchasing relevant stuff for the company. Sculpture nights. Game Jams. Design excercises, teams have to do a game quickly based on a task set beforehand. Karaoke nights. There’s a company soccer team. Mass DS game play sessions. Anime nights. Roleplaying.
What we do for money? Consulting. Mattel, Lego, OPB, Disney, Ragdoll, Fisher Price, others. Possible because of the research.
How to be an honest hustler. Eric is the main hustler at Gamelab. :) He likes speaking. You need to designate someone. Know what are you hustling. It’s important you know how to hustle your company.
Hustle to context: different contexts require different hustling, speak differently for differently audiences. Academics and reportes are interested in different things.
Inveolve your staff in creating the vision. If your staff feels like being part of the company, they’ll do a hustle for you. It’s important eveone feels the same.
Be honest: don’t lie. Do great work and then point at the work.
Downloadables are the shareware 2.0. :) Play first, then pay for a download.
Casual Game Industry. Eric hates the term, which musician wants to say he plays “casual music”.
Has some deep problems. Low conversion, crowded with content, conservative portals. If 3% of players purchase, game considered a hit. Developer gets very little money if he distributes through big channels, too many levels of companies that take a cut.
What’s working: digital distribution, meritocracy, leads to other platforms, it is the future.
Continual Process Improvement.
Forget great ideas; focus on great process. Eric doesn’t believe in great ideas, a good process will solve all problems. Don’t put pressure on individuals to solve your issues. The process solves problems, not people. Do constant improvement. Have good tools and technologies that facilitate your processes.
Self-funding downloadables
Lego Fever. Out of Your MIND. Self-funded or limited funding from outside. Gamelab owns the property.
New Models
Multiplayer: looking beyond casual games. GameStar Mechanic: hustling MacArthur. An environment that teaches kids about how to design a game.
Gamelab Institure of Play – rethinking a game development company.
Playing with the system: How games work: rules -> play. A moder for running a company. A model for transforming the industry. We can change the rules, rethink that games are, how companies should work. Lots of opportunities. Thank you!
QA: A downloadable that sells 100k copies is considered a good success, depending on development costs. Eric belives there’s a huge market that’s being untapped, like college students. Casual Games Industry too concentrated on certain parts of the market.
So, Gamelab sounds like a nice place to work in.