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games industry network programming

Can OnLive work, technically? If so, how?

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 can achieve with off the shelf compressors right now. He comes to a similar conclusion on the issue of latency, although having seen the video I disagree on the quality (he feels it’s unacceptable) – it’s clearly inferior, but it still provides a very nice experience, especially if you’re sitting 6-12 feet away from the screen.

Categories
GDC 2009

GDC 2009: all transcripts / liveblogs

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

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

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

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

The Indie Businessman

GDC: Games That Connect People

GDC09: Game Mechanics Without Rules

GDC09: Worlds In Motion Summit: Keynote

GDC09: Online Games: Europe Challenges

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

GDC09: How to sell Social Networking to your Publisher

GDC09: Building and Sustaining Successful Free to Play MMOs

GDC 2009: Role of games in personal and social change

GDC09: Post Mortem: Mission Architect for City of Heroes

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

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

GDC09: Meaning, Aesthetics, and User-Generated Content

GDC09: Taking Spore seriously

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

GDC09: Red Oceans and Blue Oceans

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.

Categories
GDC 2009

GDC09: Online Games: Europe Challenges

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.

Categories
GDC 2009

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

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.

Categories
GDC 2009 social networking web 2.0

GDC09: How to sell Social Networking to your Publisher

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 way through). Hence the unusually dour presentation style. Sorry!