Game talk

I will be a panelist at When Worlds Collide, an event put on by IGDA San Diego and attached to the Sandbox Symposium which is part of SIGGRAPH. (I think I have all those connections right). The topic is pretty interesting:

Steve Crane, EVP Product Development (Midway)
Raph Koster, President (Areae)
John Baez, President (The Behemoth)
…and another panelist to be announced.

With innovations in technology and business, video games (like mobile phones) are becoming smaller and more distributed; at the same time, video games are also becoming bigger and more integrated. Mammoth productions from heavyweight studios supported by hordes of A-list developers and “garage” games developed on shoestring budgets by independent and comparatively unknown developers are now pit against each other in competition for leading positions in the same league.

While worldwide sales of video games are expected to reach $13 billion by 2012, the once-homogenous market for video games has expanded to comprise serious, casual, and mobile games in addition to traditional forms of interactive entertainment. In this panel, leaders and pioneers will meet to share their thoughts on the challenges of diverging markets for video games. As game developers and business executives from both sides of the “big versus small” divide, each panelist brings a unique perspective to the discussion.

Anyway, it’s on the 4th, and there’s pretty limited space, so if you’re in town and interested, head on over to the website.

It was always a matter of time. Here’s the official word.

Investors look for the “Holy Grail” of casual gaming is an interesting article over at Ars Technica, about a talk at the Casual Games Association’s conference last week, given by a managing director at an investment bank. Basically, he outlines the key things that investors are looking for in the space:

• diverse portfolio, but not mere aggregators: “companies that offer game portals, in-game advertising, and casual MMOs”
• not hardcore: “lasting appeal and a strong casual base along with a strong monetization potential”
• ad-friendly: “in-game and on-site with banners”
• Web 2.0-ish: “user-created content, and a simplicity of design that allows making and inviting friends a painless process”

Why the interest? Because it looks like these are games that draw recurring revenue from mass audiences, as opposed to drawing recurring revenue from hardcore audiences or no revenue from mass audiences. And costs are low. He specifically says that the Holy Grail is not World of Warcraft, because it’s too small and based on subscriptions.

Heydon’s slides are available here (PDF). One slide claims that in 2007 there were over $135m raised for this sort of project, and he lists some of the ones that raised the most money. Even scarier, he projects almost a half a billion dollars in acquisitions happening in 2007. Yikes.

So what’s the Holy Grail in his opinion?

MySpace + YouTube + Maple Story + Skype + Habbo Hotel = 100 million users.

Gamasutra – World of Warcraft Hits 9 Million Subscribers

And yes, they mean actual players (a lot of people seem to think that WoW’s numbers are “registered user” figures, but they’re not).

I finally got around to reading Dan Cook’s The Chemistry Of Game Design on Gamasutra. At the rate other folks are going, I won’t have to write “A Grammar of Gameplay.”

The skill chains he describes are, of course, basically the same as the game atoms I’ve been messing with, and very similar to the diagrams that Andrew McLennan & co. have been working on, and to Ben Cousins’ stuff, and so on. I tend to think that the reason we’re all saying roughly the same thing is because, well, this is kinda how it is.

Read More “Cooking up Chemistry”