I’m interested: do I have this today simply because I happen – for the next few hours – to be physically in the United States of America, and so my IP address passed the iTunes store check and let me have it? I’ve been hearing that back home no-one can get hold of this little [...]
5 Comments » This week, a game service was announced that would stream games to your home TV without you needing to own a console or PC. A lot of people are wondering: are these guys smoking crack?
EDIT: Richard Leadbetter at Eurogamer has an article with some great “side by side compare” video to show theoretical quality you [...]
Here are all the liveblogs / transcripts I’ve found so far for the 2009 Game Developers Conference. If you want your blog posts to be included in the live RSS feed for future games industry conferences, let me or Darius know a week or so before the conference – we cover the big ones like [...]
Thomas Bidaux, ICO Partners
Summary
Far too much information to be any kind of practical guide (there were at least 5 (maybe 10) slides I don’t even mention here, full of facts and figures, that were glossed over too fast to record). Although note that Thomas said he’d be posting the full slides on the ICO Partners [...]
Andrew Finch
Nik Davidson
Summary
Seemed very strange that it got killed as a project. It sounded as though WotC had “learnt from the experience” but it also sounded very foolish to have haemmhoraged the newly-trained/experienced personnel. That smells like some kind of political battle that got lost rather than a normal operating decision.
NB: The slot for this [...]
Adam Martin, (me!)
Summary
I was giving this talk, so … no live writeup this time :).
The slides are up on slideshare here:
http://www.slideshare.net/guest38ac74/how-to-sell-social-networking-to-your-boss-and-publisher-1215019
NB: I lost my voice the morning of the talk, and panicked, and rewrote the slides to include everything in words in case I couldn’t get my voice back (or if it cut out part [...]
This is going to be, um, … interesting. Darius lost his voice this week (some throat infection cominbed with lots of drinking, nonstop talking/networking, and then aggresive partying each night). Poor guy, he was totally inaudible yesterday.
And this morning I could hardly talk too, so I’m on a diet of “not speaking” and hoping it [...]
Don Choi, OGPlanet
Summary
Very little of interest in this talk. I think there is a *lot* more you could say, and it would be a lot valuable and interesting, on the topics covered. I have no idea why the talk was so content-light (mis-guessed the audience? speaker having to give someone else’s talk? lawyers insisted on [...]
Alex Evans, Media Molecule
Mark Healey, Media Molecule
Summary
The MM guys are funny as ever, although Alex’s “I made it myself on the way here” presentation tool would perhaps have been more usefully replaced with something like Presi (or whatever it’s called – the “interactive” presentation tool that is like Alex’s thing, but on steroids. Ask Jussi, [...]
Sulka Haro, Sulake
Summary
The intersection between social and gaming, and where that should be going, instead of where lots of people are obsessing about taking it.
(I have more to add here later, but I’ve got to run to a meeting; will update the post when I have time)
Raph Koster, Metaplace
Summary
Raph promised to be nice and not make us depressed this year. It was an elegy on “look how much we progressed as an industry during 2008″.
EDIT: Alice has a shorter and sweeter summary up on Wonderland.
Austin Hill, Akoha
Summary
Conference organizer introduced this as “during this first talk, think about the platform they’ve made, as much as you do the game; that could be especially interesting for this audience”.
I totally support the principles and the ideals. The game looks fun and interesting, and at the same time taking a very “Don’t worry, [...]
4 hours sleep or less?
Check
The main 8 hour event I’ve come for today “not listed” on conference programme?
Check
The big posters-sized signs don’t list any of the summit locations?
Check
The map claims that the giant room where the first session takes place “doesn’t exist”?
Check
No coffee and breakfast today?
Check (argh!)
I guess it must be the first day of [...]
Lots of news sites and blogs have reported that the recession has affected GDC this year, with lot of cancelled parties and a big drop in attendees. I wouldn’t be surprised, given all the redundancies (although … wouldn’t that mean more people looking to recruit / be recruited?), but the first round of evidence – [...]
We finally have a mainstream response (as opposed to responses sitting quietly in obscurity in the IGDA.org forums) to the issue of IGDA Board Members pissing all over IGDA’s main tenets:
http://www.igda.org/newsroom/memo_032209.php
(from the IGDA monthly newsletter that just went out to all 15,000+ members)
Instances of the following words in that response:
sorry – 0
mistake – 0
fault [...]
What’s the biggest single challenge to a Studio Director? Or to the VP of Development / Studios who oversees a handful of publisher-owned studios?
Recruitment
In the games industry there are no raw materials of variable quality, there is no variety of base services to build upon; everything that distinguishes one company (and set of products) from [...]
For a mere $600 (yes, that *is* going to double the cost of the GDC ticket that you already bought), you can go to this competing event on Tuesday next week:
“VentureBeat is teaming with industry heavy-weights.”
Ah, hubris, how we love you.
“You’ll learn how one of the most successful and rapidly growing sectors in the high-tech [...]
http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2009/QBlog210309B.html
Your professor tells you that you can’t study them for their own sake. However, if they’re as exciting as you say, and all the young people are reading them, then perhaps you could write an educational one? He therefore instructs you to go away and write a novel to teach addition.
For one of the conferences [...]
I’m very tempted to make this:
http://gizmodo.com/5172615/iphone-os-30-will-turn-your-phone-into-a-revolutionary-sex-toy?skyline=true&s=x
…with particular emphasis on the social / avatar / chat / networking features.
(seriously – otherwise I’ll be phoneless thoughout GDC :( )
I’ve had no interest in cracking my iPhone, so I haven’t.
Until I discovered the other day that my incompetent network (O2) won’t allow me to make calls in the USA on the agreement I have with them, so I need to use a local USA SIM [...]
