GDC 2009 - Day 2
Well today was another fantastic day here in sunny San Francisco at the Game Developers' Conference! The day started out well with me wearing my new shirt that I bought. I left the hotel at about 11:45 and got the copies of my resume that I had ordered last night. I made it to the first workshop at about 12:05 which was by one of the guys from CCP/White-Wolf on leveraging social networks to maintain and increase membership. It was really interesting and I think I have learned some new ideas to improve membership in WMLU amongst other things. Mavens (know-it-alls), Connectors (knows and can talk to any/everyone), and Salespeople (can sell snow to penguins if they believe in their product) are the three types of individuals to focus on and gear your PR department to. Get them involved online, manage them well, and they will bring more people with them and you can expect a growth in membership and usage of your product. I took some verbal notes afterward, expect them to be typed up this weekend or early next week.
After that I wandered around for a while checking out the Career Expo area and the regular Expo area. I got some lunch and went to another talk, this time on how Windows 7 will impact gaming. I will post more details on that later when I type up my notes from the conference but from the way it seems, Microsoft might actually be making some right decisions in its design ideas. I never thought I'd say that honestly, and it may turn out to be like the rest of their products, but if it works the way it should it will be an interesting paradigm shift in gaming.
I went back to the regular Expo area after that and checked out some of the booths. I got to play the beta of the Ghostbusters game (sorry no pics, they weren't allowed). It actually felt like Ghostbusters and definitely had the look of it. Slinging a proton pack around was a hell of a lot of fun! Then it turned out that Ubisoft was about to announce a new game in partnership with Intel! I was shocked but got a prime spot for pics and video of the demo (which I will be posting soon). Called Ruse, its an RTS that takes the camera from Supreme Commander and just blows it out of the water! It can have up to 1 BILLION polygons on the screen at any one time and you can zoom all the way from a megamap mode down to ground level with the troops. This is key in directing them where you need them. You also have these "Ruses" that you can use to try to gain an advantage on your enemy. Only two were shown and I will try to get the third one demoed for me tomorrow but there will be 10 total for the released game. It is a WWII RTS but it could easily be expanded with other forces as DLCs (though no real comment was given on that at the time). The UI is VERY unobtrusive and does not really exist except for a few icons in the upper left hand corner. The game looked beautiful and played well. I'm looking forward to playing it though to take full advantage of it, you'll need a truly multicore processor set up and a hefty graphics card. They demoed it on an Intel i7 chip with 6 GB of RAM and an Ati 4780 x2 graphics card. I hope thats not the MINIMUM requirements!
I will say that both the Expo areas and the after conference stuff was quite toned down this year. There is no CCP/White-Wolf party this year and I have yet to find another company hosting anything big. There were also fewer expo booths than last year and many of them were smaller sized. Everyone is saying its due to the economy but crowds are still high here so people are still interested in gaming. It appears that even with this lower amount of expoers and parties that the Gaming industry will thrive much like early Hollywood did during the Depression. If digital distribution takes off it will help as well since you can get more games for the same money and the producers save on the creation costs. Here is hoping!
The OnLive system was quite interesting as well! This was recommended to me by a friend of mine as something I should definitely check out. Imagine having a console the size of some cell phones that streams all of your games from the internet. Now imagine that you could save your game and resume it on your PC or Mac? And imagine that you could save video clips to share, watch your friends play other games, join in the middle of a game if it seemed fun, and see what players around the world are playing? Well imagine no more because that is the OnLive system! The "console" part has an HDMI out, two USB ports, a network port, and a power adaptor. Thats it! You have to have broadband for it to work but the games were VERY responsive and looked great graphically. Load times were small as well; Burnout Paradise loaded in about 30-45 seconds. Pricing was not mentioned as of yet as they are still working out the details. I would expect either a "rental" system or a cheaper "pay to own" system. This will help solve the DRM and pirating problems as well as no physical media is involved. It was rather intruiging. Expect this around November of this year. There were two neural devices on display this year and I plan on checking them out tomorrow. Valve is on a hiring blitz at the moment too and I am considering putting in for one. At the very least the experience in an interview wouldn't hurt. They had TONS of people signing up for them so I wonder what new projects are on the horizon? The Perfect World people are hiring as well and I plan on getting some pics of the booth for Jim at work.
Later in the evening after a much needed dinner at Mel's diner I went to the IGF and Game Developer awards. There were a LOT of really neat entries and I am looking forward to trying some tomorrow in the Independent Games booth area. Fallout 3 won Game of the Year and Hideo Kojima got a Lifetime Achievement Award (very well deserved for his creation of Metal Gear Solid and his work on over 50 other games). The co-founders of Harmonix got the Pioneer award and Tommy Tallarico got the Ambassador award for his contributions to spreading the "Gospel of Gaming" through Video Games Live; the live music performances of game music. The creators of Little Big Planet were on stage quite a bit after winning around 3 or 4 awards. Braid deserves an honorable mention after being in nearly every category as a contender. Cortex Command also gets a mention from me since it did win several awards and was in quite a few categories as well. Go Indie Devs and go mainstream Pubs! I was a little upset at the presenter of the IGF awards due to his comments about used game sales. I hate to say it but used games are here to stay and publishers need to learn to make games that can be expanded with DLCs or move to digital distribution. Not all gamers can afford to buy a lot of games and for some used games and systems are the only ways they'll ever get to play. Remember you have an audience as well, not just a sales number. Most of the developers seem to realize that and many of them were truly grateful for their awards. I love seeing that and seeing the passion people have for their jobs. Its fantastic to see and just reinforces my decision to get into the industry just that much more!
I got to meet Tim Schafer after the show. He was the presenter for the Game Developer Awards (not the guy I was irritated at). He was the creator of quite a few older LucasArts games (Full Throttle anyone?) and is currently the one that created Brutal Legend which will hopefully be released soon. I got a picture with him as well which was just awesome! He is quite insane which is great (its a job requirement here I swear!). I also got to speak to Hideo Kojima though I couldn't get a picture. He does not speak english very well so I wasn't sure how to get his attention. So me being myself I just ran up him and his group that was leaving and went "Mr. Kojima-san! Mr. Kojima-san!" Then I bowed as deeply as I could and said, "Thank you very much for your wonderful games." He smiled and said, "Thank you." I was told by several people near by that I have huge cajones (my response was "Why do you think I walk bowlegged?"). They had considered doing that but weren't sure if they should. If you don't take risks you will never prosper!
Infinity Ward (who is also producing Ghostbusters I believe) showed a teaser trailer for a new game. The website is www.modernwarfare2.com and it looked quite interesting from what I could tell.
I'm hoping tomorrow will be just as exciting as today was! I'll let you know anything else exciting I find out!
Peace!
Gerry
P.S. My Luggage FINALLY got here! Yay for having clothes! :D