The next session I attended was a panel discussion on the future of MMOs.  Question 1 solicited general agreement: "can you be successful without outside IP?".  Basically "it depends" with most agreement the larger the project the more important established IP becomes to draw in the crowds you'll need to break even.

The next question had the same "it depends" response: are MMOs going cross-platform, launched on PC and consoles at the same time?  But a pattern started to emerge: Jack Emmert from Cryptic taking more, uhm, shall we say "evangelical" viewpoints with the others, especially Ray Muzyka (BioWare) defaulting to: "start with the game, then go where the audience is, and that will determine which platforms to use.

The next question set off the fireworks: "Micropayments: a viable North American business model?".  Jack was adamantly opposed to micropayments giving plenty of personal examples of how subscriptions are valuable to him (cable, phone, etc.) and that micropayments would never be a viable model.  When Min Kim (Nexon) dryly retorted "well, it's 85% of our business model and we seem to be doing fine" the audience erupted in applause.  The remaining dynamic for that exchange were pros and cons of different models, and ultimately a panel agreeing that many bizdev types are too quick to jump onto the "micropayments is THE model!" bandwagon and it goes back to first things first: what is the game, who is the audience, THEN decide the right business models that best work with that specific environment. 

The next question looked at the growing cost of MMO development, with the panel seeing a bifurcation of the market into blockbusters and low-budget.  Each studio discussed how they deal with that, but one thing I think they missed was that this is the model Hollywood has been operating under for decades, especially since the rise of the Independent Film movement.  There's definitely something they could learn from that experience, but there wasn't one mention of how Hollywood's been dealing (and NOT dealing) with this issue.

THe panel was then opened up to audience questions.  The first was whether SciFi as a genre could be successful as Fantasy, with Bioware speaking for the entire panel when they said: "go back to the game.  Have a great idea and it won't matter the genre.  Before StarWars, scifi was viewed as a niche film genre, afterwards EVERYONE wanted to produce a scifi film".

The next question was a rambling thing about UGC and rights and value; the panel didn't understand it and neither did I…and with 5 minutes left in the session took that as my exit cue. 

One session I attended yesterday but forgot to comment on was the WildTangent session.  They presented basically a sales pitch for their upcoming launch, which is pure digital distribution of games to PCs, including console games.  I'm assuming it means console games will be played through an emulator, which to me means they'll only be able to distribute older (pre-NextGen console) titles.  They signed up quite a few publishers, including THQ and Activision (I think).  Very much an iTunes buy-my-TV-show model.

It's certainly the right direction to be going in.  But at this stage I get the impression the major publishers are only populating it with their back-catalog and other older offerings, partly because of the technology limitations I mentioned but also because they're still testing the waters of digital distribution.  They'll have to ramp up quickly and get top titles fast, otherwise they're not that different from GameTap. 

Still trying to figure out why none of the HTML functions are working for me, so apologies for the text-only posting. 

Today was supposed to start with a Macrovision session on digital distribution, but the speaker never showed, so it was quality time with my coffee and Starbuck's Yogurt Parfait instead.

I next managed to get a seat at the jam-packed Ray Kurtzweil keynote address.  Last time I was in that room was for the Direct Marketing Association's 2007 show which had Richard Branson (of Virgin fame) as the speaker.  He's a very low-key, almost deadpan, public speaker but the audience was still very much entranced with this clearly brilliant mind.  He has a  gift for the understated joking aside, starting with his opening about how "games" in an unfortunate name for the industry given it's real value (a telephone conversation is "virtual", but does that make a verbal agreement over the phone any less real than one in person?  Of course not…so why do we treat games and virtual world interactions differently?")

To set up the topic, what was Games: The Next 20 years, he took a look back.  He observed that 95% of innovative projects fail because their timing is off.  One reason for that off timing is that growth is exponential, not linear, and our thinking processes are based on linear evolution ("there's something in the corner of my coming towards a certain spot…it'll get there in 20 seconds and I better not be in that spot…this is good for cavemen, not for us").  When we look at innovation and pace of change as an exponential function, the overall paradigm shifts become relatively easy to predict.  He then showed plenty of examples: over the past 40 years there's been a billion-fold increase in computing price/performance.  And that pace is accellerating: there will be another billion-fold improvement over the next 25 years.

The result is a democratizing of communications, tools of creation, and tools of production.  Example: his own Kurtzweil Reading Maching for the blind, in 1979 was the size of a washing machine.  You now have a much more powerful version on a smart phone.

So what's the implication for Games?  Well, if it takes >6months to design a game, you need to design it for where the technology/market WILL BE, not where it is now, otherwise it'll be obsolete by the time it gets launched.  Things like computing devices disappear by 2020, replaced by embedded computing in eyeglasses, clothing, mobile devices, etc.  

Definitely lots of food for thought, and not even sure what that means yet.   One of those thinking exercises perfect for quality time with a coffee and yogurt parfait.

Day 1 of the main sessions started today at Game Developers Conference San Francisco 2008 (GDC) here in a FINALLY sunny San Francisco.  After 3 days of rain the skies cleared this morning to a lovely day…perfect to be inside the entire time trolling about the show floor and sessions.

The IBM Booth setup this year is a pretty simple affair; I'll post photos by the end of the show.  We're in a not bad spot, thankfully far enough away from the noisy ones (did I say HP?). So far the Interactive Ray Tracing demo seems to be winning the lion's share of drop-in interest.  Since the link function isn't working in WordPress today, here's the URL to learn more: http://www-304.ibm.com/jct03004c/businesscenter/smb/us/en/contenttemplate/!!/gcl_xmlid=123753/?&ca=smbINDMediaGDC&tactic=&me=W&met=inli&re=smbindmediagamespromo2a

We already have some press coverage with our partnership announcement with Terremark on a project with ChinaDotCom.  Here's the URL: http://www.stockhouse.ca/news/news.asp?tick=IBM&newsid=6361711

We also hosted a session today on "Surprises from the Hellgate London Launch".  We had a good audience, 2/3 full in a room holding about 100, and a good sign: no one left until the 5 minutes before the end.  It was a candid discussion about the technical learnings from Ping0 and Flagship Studio's fall 2007 launch of Hellgate London, with a lot of lessons learned mainly around infrastructure sizing, coding processes, and the importance of "non-game" systems like user forums, billing, and more that wind up being critical to online game success.  David Laux, Global Executive for Games and Interactive Entertainment, moderated a panel.  Good (hard) questions from the audience; I got the impression people were happy to learn from Flagship's experience. Hellgate London: http://www.hellgatelondon.com.  GNi: http://www.gni.com 

I also attended a session hosted by Akamai on content delivery networks.  nVidia was a guest speaker, but to be perfectly frank I thought he spent too much time talking about nVidia's game successes and not enough on the direct linkages to digital content delivery and the challenges they face.  The Akamai speaker went into a little more detail on the benefits of a CDN.  Overall a decent high-level discussion, but I was hoping for a little more meat.

Oh, a shout out to Doug Mealy at OM-PR (http://www.om-pr.com) who's been in the biz for a long time and has been doing some fun stuff with us recently, including letting us co-sponsor a press booth at the show this year.  

Ah, and I ran into Jean-Michel Blottiere from NX Publishing (http://www.nxpublishing.com).  We worked together a few years ago on a virtual, live games summit.  We had speakers from multiple cities live via webcam, including Richard Garriott, Adam Joffe, Jeff Anderson, Julien Merceron and more.  For a newbie like me, bringing together all these big names on a little screen live from Paris, San Diego, Boston and Austin was very exciting, and without Jean-Michel it couldn't have happened.  A nice pleasure seeing him again.

Well, enough for now, will post more tomorrow.  

From the Jan 29 Hollywood Reporter (yeah, I know I'm 2 weeks behind on my reading): "Par plants promo flag in teen virtual world Habbo".  Money quote:

"…Under the terms of the agreement - one of the first between a major studio and a virtual world - Habbo will have merchandising rights throughout North America for "Beowulf", "Mean Girls" and the upcoming "The Spiderwick Chronicles"…" 

While this is more often than not a technology blog, it's also about the business of games too.  This announcement to me shows Paramount is thinking strategically about natural extensions of selected franchises to where their audiences are going (or already are).  Unlike "hey, this is cool, let's do a virtual world!", it shows someone has been thinking hard about how to leverage virtual asset sales and audience migration away from traditional media like cinema.

Time will tell, of course, whether there will be real value from the partnership.  But for all it's vaunted progressiveness, Hollywood is often a very conservative business, so this stands out in my mind.  Just look how long it took them to jump onto the digital distribution bandwagon.  MTV is ahead of the pack in this regards, of course, especially with their games studio expansion.