Day: March 29, 2009

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 GDC and AGDC, and some of the smaller ones.

I’ll edit this list as more appear – feel free to copy/paste any you find into the comments section and I’ll edit them in up here.

GDC09: Meaningful Social Reality Games

• T=Machine coverage

GDC09: ‘Winging It’ – Ups, Downs, Mistakes, Successes in the Making of LITTLEBIGPLANET

• Double Buffered coverage
• T=Machine coverage

GDC09: Advanced Data Mining and Intelligence from Large-Scale Game Data

• Double Buffered coverage
• Tiny Subversions coverage

GDC Transcript: James Portnow, User Generated Story: The Promsie of Unsharded Worlds

• Tiny Subversions coverage

The Indie Businessman

• Wonderland coverage

GDC: Games That Connect People

• Inside Social Games coverage

GDC09: Game Mechanics Without Rules

• T=Machine coverage

GDC09: Worlds In Motion Summit: Keynote

• T=Machine coverage

GDC09: Online Games: Europe Challenges

• T=Machine coverage

GDC09: Dragonslaying: Facebook lessons learned from Dungeons and Dragons Tiny Adventures

• T=Machine coverage

GDC09: How to sell Social Networking to your Publisher

• T=Machine coverage

GDC09: Building and Sustaining Successful Free to Play MMOs

• T=Machine coverage

GDC 2009: Role of games in personal and social change

• Wonderland coverage

GDC09: Post Mortem: Mission Architect for City of Heroes

• Double Buffered coverage

GDC09: The Cruise Director of AZEROTH: Directed Gameplay within WORLD OF WARCRAFT

• Double Buffered coverage

GDC09: From COUNTER-STRIKE to LEFT 4 DEAD: Creating Replayable Cooperative Experiences

• Double Buffered coverage

GDC09: Meaning, Aesthetics, and User-Generated Content

• Double Buffered coverage

GDC09: Taking Spore seriously

• T=Machine coverage

GDC09: From COUNTER-STRIKE to LEFT 4 DEAD: Creating Replayable Cooperative Experiences

• Double Buffered coverage

GDC09: Red Oceans and Blue Oceans

• T=Machine coverage

NB: most of these were pulled from the shared Twitter feed we did this year, but I was afraid that might not remain live and working forever (a lot of sites cycle out their RSS data over time), so I wanted to capture it before it was too late!

Well done to all the bloggers who reported on the conference in such fine style! It’s great to see more people taking the plunge and adding their own professional opinions into the mix.

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 website soon, so you should be able to go over the charts yourself once that goes up.

But I think it achieved something more useful: it gave a great taster of just how broad and deep this topic is, when publishers and developers (especially American ones, but even European ones) often massively underestimate it – and lose lots and lots of money as a result. It also gave some concrete examples of what can go wrong and how, especially on the ratings side of things.

I suggested after the talk that it would be awesome to also do a long standalone list of the concrete examples. They’re not only highly illustrative but also often very funny. Watch this space (ICO Partners blog)! (hint, hint).

NB: Thomas was my boss at NCsoft until he left at the start of 2008.

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 talk was half the normal length for GDC talks (speakers choose their alotted time period, usually), hence the short writeup – the speakers tried to cram a fair amount in the time they had.