Reality Panic

The next meeting of the IGDA’s Guildford UK chapter will be a discussion on unions. More specifically, reps from the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre Union (BECTu) will be on hand to discuss their initiatives to orgnize UK-based game talent. Should make for an interesting and lively event.

The irony, however, is that EA is the sponsor for the evening. Or, more precisely, they are sponsorsing the bar. Not sure how that got worked out ;)

And so, two weeks after getting back from SIGGRAPH in Boston, I went back to the exact same convention center for another conference. This time, it had nothing to do with games… I attended the annual conference for the American Society of Association Executives so I could learn how to do my job better (ie, run the IGDA). You could call it the GDC for non-profit folks ;)

Anyway, conference was great and luckily timing worked out so that I was able to serve as the guest speaker for the IGDA’s Boston chapter August meeting. I used it as a chance to extend on my recent positive spinning via my informal “Raves” project. It was great to see around 100 local pros out for the meeting. Kudos to Kent Quirk and the Boston chapter team.

A few quick picks from my (second) trip to Boston:

The opening reception for the conference was held at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. I sprinted through the entire museum in about an hour!
Sadly, they only had one piece from Jackson Pollock.

Of all the paintings, something about this one just caught my eye and made me pause to take it in…

This diety from the Japanese/Budhist section was quite creepy looking.

We have booth babes, the association world (surprisingly) has choreographed dancers and a rapping dude to wake you up at 8:30 in the morning! It was quite cheesy/forced…

Ah, back to reality. Local game development folks packed in at the chapter meeting.

IP lawyer dude, Hunter ?, mentions that he’s working on game stuff and would like input/feedback from the audience.

Jeremy’s juxtaposition…

?, Dan Roy (MIT) and Kent Quirk (CogniToy) chatting away.

Hank Howie (Blue Fang Games) and Vicky Wu (FrogHop) at the bar…

This is an easy one… In the coming years, we’ll see more and more games adopt a “free-to-play” model where the game itself is given out for free along with access (and, I’m not just talking about the casual games space). Revenue will be generated via the sale of in-game goods, premium services or supported via ad dollars.

I’ve been pointing to Korea as an example of this since I was there in the fall of ‘05 and was stunned by their business developments. They are even starting to abandon the transitional MMO subscription model in favor of micro-transaction based revenue. Korea got there faster than the rest of us since they had to be smart about ways to make money in a market with rampant piracy of retail/boxed product.

Other examples of this would be Second Life, with a rich internal player-to-player economy. It is free to play, but you need to pay if you want some virtual real-estate. Runescape is an ad-supported MMO that’s free. Runescape has over 9million active subscribers! Also, Activision recently announced that it has generated $1million dollars from downloadable content for Call of Duty 2 on Xbox 360.

At what point does it become more profitable for Activision to give out the game for free and put more effort (marketing and game design wise) to encourage the sale of in-game content?

(Oh, and as this post was idling in draft mode, the fine folks at Terra Nova have written a post titled “How will ‘free-to-play’ business models affect the gaming landscape in the West?” I haven’t had the chance to read it yet, but I’m sure it’s good - those guys are so smart :)

The July issue of Develop has no less than 35 job ads peppered within its 100 pages. And, the opening article is titled “Can’t get the staff?”, which is a look at the talent crisis currently affecting the UK game development community. The article goes on to describe how desperate studios are to acquire new/more talent and the challenges in finding the right people for the right jobs, suggesting studios need to look to academia more or take a broader view to other entertainment/tech sectors.

Of course, there’s no mention about solving the industry’s retention issue (aka the QoL debate). The article mentions “perma-crunch” as one of the issues tying up all the staff. Uh, well, what about the effect perma-crunch has on losing the people you ALREADY have?! Rule of thumb is that it’s always less expensive/easier to hold onto something you have (ie, retention), than to acquire something new. In part, this was one of the arguments I was making in my “Friction Costs” Escapist article a few months back.

Conference after conference, I witness manager and recruiter types running around in a frenzy trying to score new talent. In fact, the August issue of Develop discusses how irate some studio heads are getting at the underhanded tactics being used to recruit staff.

But, never once is there mention of a strategy to ensure they don’t lose the staff they already have in place via better QoL. Everyone’s so focused on getting people in the door, no one is watching all the experienced people leaving out the back door. Sad.

That said, in a totally unrelated/unlinked article covering the Women in Game conference (which I had the joy to attend), Deb Tillet (president of Breakaway Games) is quoted:

“Employees are your assets. They make it possible for you to make money, they are your engine and your soul. If they are not happy and well cared for you are in trouble.”

Breakaway’s retention rate is near-perfect and recruiting has not been a major challenge for them…

This is just too hilarious! I can’t stop laughing/smiling :) Reminds me of when I did backflips when I got my Sega Master System many an xmas ago…

Wow, talk about excited. Even the little girl is super happy.

Thanks to GameSetWatch for the interesting post pointing to it…

It was crazy hot in Boston last week. Like, crazy humid icky hot. Didn’t help that I was running around town, attending both the Sandbox games symposium and SIGGRAPH itself, and moderating/participating on five different sessions. It was a busy week.

The Sandbox event was a great first attempt at a more game focused conference intersecting with SIGGRAPH (which has always worked to woo the game dev crowd). Admittedly, there was an overall lack of thematic conhesion, resulting in the often comical pairings of topics (eg, crowd simulation code distribution/optimization techniques along with a polemic lecture on democracy and government funded games). Hmm, perhaps that’s what lead to the conference’s charm… David Edery has some commentary on his quick visit into the Sandbox. Also, Dan Roy has some good notes on the “in the trenches” panel I moderated, ditto for Gamasutra’s write-up on the QoL panel I spoke on.

SIGGRAPH itself felt bigger than just 20k attendees. Perhaps is was the massive Boston convention center that just made things feel so big… Still, the event was fun and full of energy. As usual, I was mainly captivated by all the funky art/tech stuff, like the Guerilla Studio, Emerging Technologies and art exhibits, etc. Gamasutra has a summary of some of the Emerging Tech pieces.

The IGDA’s “birds of feather” session was well attended, despite being located in the farthest room of the building! We mainly discussed positive trends going on in the industry today, with notes being dumped into my new informal “raves” project…

The game content/responsibility panel was particularly fun and was an important opportunity to discuss the social/cultural challenges surrounding games to a somewhat broader audience (than who would be at GDC, for example). The session got some quick coverage at both Gamasutra by Jill Duffy and Candace Lombardi at CNET.

Probably the most interesting and useful outcome was from fellow panelist Liz Losh. Having been inspired by the discussion (and her comment that the parental support materials produced by Hilary Clinton were sub-par), she created the “10 Principles for the Digital Family“. Nice.

Anyway, here are some photos from the trip.

Greg Costikyan (Manifesto Games) praises the “process intensity” of classics like Chris Crawford’s Balance of Power.
Tracy Rosenthal-Newsom (Harmonix) watches on as attendees compete at Guitar Hero 2.

Conference chair Drew Davidson (CMU ETC) enjoys the icecream bar. Yummy!

Olga Sorkine was one of the few female researchers presenting a paper. Of ~100 papers, about a half-dozen had female authors or co-authors.

Graphics legend Jim Blinn summarizes his paper during the “FastForward” preview session.

This guy took advantage of the FastForward to do more than just push his research…

A pixelated Nick Burton (Rare) before sitting for a nice tapas style dinner.

Tobias Biehl (IO Interactive) and Tim Rance (Lionhead) enjoying the tapas meal.

Heather Kelley (A2M), at same dinner, with purse shaped chocolate treat.

Appropriately for Boston, there was a teapot exhibit looking at the famous SIGGRAPH teapot model…

One of the funky instalations at the Art Gallary.

Very cool media table thing from Emerging Tech.

One of the beautiful art works from the Charles Csuri retrospective.

Minority Report style “multi-touch interaction wall“. It was net connected too, diving into Flickr streams and Google Maps…

More fun stuff from Emerging Tech, “Tangible at Play“. (I was able to make an odd crab crawler ;)

Hard at work in the Guerilla Studio.

Cool live-Pong style games with the Electronic Theater audience.

Cross shot of a section of the expo floor.

IGDA SIG Queens: Education SIG chair Susan Gold (Sierra Nevada College) and Sex SIG chair Brenda Brathwaite (Savannah College of Art & Design)

Me queuing up my slides during the games/CS educators panel (photo courtesy of Nick Burton).

Gary Schultz (Pixar) discusses the animation challenges in Cars during the Vroom Vroom: SIGGRAPH at 500 Horsepower special session.

LucasArts showing of their physics technology from the next-gen Indiana Jones game.