Sumea is proud to present the first ever recording of a Dissecta event, with hopefully more to come. This Dissecta featured speakers Tom Crago, CEO of Tantalus and President of the GDAA, Rob Murray, CEO of Firemint, and Kynan Woodman, Technical Director of Firemint. The discussion was primarily a debrief of GDC 08 and also the state of the games industry.
Tom Crago spoke first, and also gave a rundown of the DICE summit in Las Vegas. He mentioned that there are currently no awards ceremonies on par with the Oscars or the Grammy’s for games, and that the DICE organisers were hoping to build something to this effect. The DICE summit is primarily about networking between the high level players in the games industry, with social events such as poker tournaments and golf days. GDC, on the other hand, is now THE event to be at if you’re in the games industry, although if you’re in Tom’s position, you won’t spend much time at the event as many of the business deals are conducted in hotels around the conference. However when Tom did make it there he checked out the indie developers, and mentioned his slightly disappointment at not seeing any Australian devs in the mix. Some interesting observations to come out of GDC were that the PSP is being talked about more by publishers and also the PS3 is selling the same or better than the PS2 at the same stage in its lifecycle so looks poised to achieve at least the same dominance in the market that the PS2 had. Questions from the audience ranged from how the PC space is doing, the R rating for games in Australia, consolidation of large games companies, digital distribution and Steam as a distribution channel.
Rob Murray was then up to talk about developments in the mobile game space. For those of you who don’t know, Firemint is on the cutting edge of mobile technology and according to Tom, are regarded as one of the top 3 mobile developers in the world. This privileged position is recognised by mobile manufacturers and thus allows Firemint access to view the next-generation of phones that will hit the market in the next year. Apparently consumers in the US are picking up the iPhone at a tremendous rate, and a number of copycat devices are spring up to try and capture some of this buy in. He says that in the next year or two you’ll see mobile phones coming out with 3D hardware acceleration, multi input touch screens, multiple cores, HD output, accelerometers and wifi as standard. The big developments in mobile games will be in the multi-player arena as the bandwidth becomes higher and cheaper. Sadly the infrastructure to support this high bandwidth is still an area where Australia is seriously falling behind the rest of the world. The multi-touch touch screens are also creating new possibilities in the game space that Firemint is well positioned to explore. Some other things Rob mentioned is that there seemed to be more motion capture software and hardware providers than he’s ever seen before, and also that the N-gage is being talked about again, and will likely make another appearance, probably this time with more success.
Other things of note for this Dissecta was the attendance of Steve Fawkner, who I managed to chat with quickly about the success of Puzzle Quest and the new Puzzle Quest:Galactrix, which can be summed up as Puzzle Quest in space with a hex grid instead of square. Steve is very excited about Galactrix, and already thinks it’s a much better game than the original Puzzle Quest and can’t wait for it to come out. Interestingly, when asked about how the Steam distribution was working out for Puzzle Quest, he mentioned that the revenue from Steam has surpassed all other platforms combined. I asked him how long it took to get a publisher for Puzzle Quest and he said it took 18 months to get it signed, mostly because the publishers didn’t know how they would market it due to its mixing of two genres. One publisher admitted that all their staff had been playing it every lunchtime for 3 months and everyone was loving it, but they still didn’t sign it.
The night ended with the usual pizza, beer and networking, and I must say, it’s the best Dissecta I’ve been to yet.
You can download the video of the event here: DissectaGDC08, 65 minutes, 71Mb