Buzz Watch: GDC 2009 Take-Aways

Authored by Jay Baage on March 27, 2009 - 9:23am.

San Francisco - While many suits were in attendance, business attire was way out-numbered by jeans, sneakers and funny hairdos at the 2009 Game Developers Conference (GDC). GDC, which started on Monday and ended Friday, is in many ways different from E3, the other really big U.S. games show. Instead of showing off the coolest in current gadgets and games, GDC is focused on the people who will develop the next generation of games. So, what clues did the show offer attendees as to what the gaming experience will look like a few years from now, when people are sick and tired of first-person shooters, sports games and derivative adventure titles? Perhaps most telling of things to come is what is going on around the Nintendo Wii, the iPhone and Facebook - ground-breaking new platforms which encourage developers to experiment with fresh approaches to games. The following are five take-aways from GDC and VentureBeat's GamesBeat event on Tuesday:

1. The Nintendo Wii, the clear leader in the next-generation console race, just passed another major milestone. Satoru Iwata, Nintendo President, told the crowd in a GDC keynote on Wednesday that global shipments of the Wii have now passed 50 million, making it the fastest selling hardware in video game history. Microsoft comes in second, despite having a year's head start over the Wii, with around 30 million in sales of its Xbox 360. Sony's PlayStation 3 ranks third with around 21 million units sold to date.

"The market has expanded as video games have been accepted by more consumers than ever before," said Mr. Iwata.

"It's a cliche but it's not just the 18-year-old kid, it's the mom on the train, it's the high-school girl after she's done with her homework, everyone plays games."

Nintendo seems to understand this better then anyone, and the company has been able to cash in nicely on the mainstream gaming phenomenon by designing products, which reach far beyond the traditional gaming crowd. Once you start making game hardware, as well as software, which appeals to all demographics, a range of new possibilities opens up. Just a few years ago, it would have seemed like a strange idea for retirement homes to be using a gaming console to keep elderly active and fit. Thanks to the Nintendo Wii, that is a reality today. It has turned a passive sit-down environment into an active one which gets people up and moving. I can't wait to see what is around the corner for Nintendo!

2. "The iPhone is a blank canvas," sais Travis Boatman, VP WW Studios, EAMobile.

"Mobile gaming is still in its infancy, but look at the iPhone and imagine where we'll be a few years from now."

Apple sold 13.7 million iPhones in 2008 and some analysts predict that Apple will more then double that figure in 2009. Gaming is already the most popular category on the app store and the iPhone has the potential to be an amazing game platform, but is it a game-changer on the same level as the Nintendo Wii? Most people at GDC agree that it has the potential to be, but they are still figuring out how to create a game-equivalent of a killer-app for the iPhone. Also, many iPhone developers that I spoke to said that developing mobile games for the iPhone is still challenging from an economic perspective. Mobile games retail at a few dollars a pop and you have to sell many, many games for that to cover the monster budget you need to create truly amazing games. However, EA Mobile seems dedicated to investing some big money into iPhone games and also showed a new version of the classic game Scrabble, made particularly for the iPhone, with built-in chat with your friends on Facebook. While I don't really get all that excited about Scrabble specifically, I do like the chat and Facebook integration. I think we'll see more iPhone games taking advantage of other apps and social interaction, as well as touch, geographic location and motion-sensitivity.

3. Speaking of Facebook, the social networking giant is now drawing nearly twice the number of unique users worldwide as rival MySpace, counting 222 million in December compared with 125 million for the NewsCorp.-owned social network. The game development community gathered here at GDC and GamesBeat is certainly excited about the many new possibilities that social networking platforms such as Facebook offer with an open API and built-in distribution and viral marketing potential for large as well as small independent developers.

"Tapping into social networks like Facebook to let your friends know when you are playing a game is a huge component of game discovery and retention today, said Dennis Fong, retired celebrity pro gamer and Founder/CEO of Raptr, a new social gaming company based out of San Francisco.

The Raptr platform and its social media integration reach users on top services such as Facebook and Twitter and help keep them actively engaged even when they're not playing. Electronic Arts recently bought Napster-founder Shawn Fanning's new similarly named company (a coincidence?), Rupture, which will soon offer a new version of its social-gaming service. These are two companies to keep an eye on in 2009.

4. "Game designers are actually really good at teaching skills, more or less useful in the real world," says Jerry Bush, program manager for Learning@Cisco. He was taking part in the Serious Games Summit at GDC, a gathering for people using game mechanics in education. There is a growing interest in this category of games, as digital learning experiences are proving superior to one-directional classroom instruction. When we now see more gaming devices like the Wii find its way into retirement homes and companies such as Cisco increasingly using games to teach complicated IT-skills, needed to be certified to work on their equipment, perhaps mothers all over the world would not be so critical of their kids staying in and playing video games.

5. Big news at GDC is the introduction of a "cloud"-basedgaming service called OnLive, built to deliver video games without physical discs, to PCs, Macs and TVs. So far, digital delivery of games has been slow to take off. Maybe OnLive will change that? At least, the service gives you an idea of what's to come... Zeebo, a company partially funded by Qualcomm, also unveiled a 3G wireless video game console aimed at emerging markets at GDC. The company plans to start shipping the device to the Brazilian market next month. At first I was skeptical about the chances of a new player to break into the console market dominated by the Nintendo Wii, PS3 and the Xbox. However, Zeebo is taking a different approach to the console all together. It is not aimed at the saturated U.S. gaming market, but middle-class gamers in emerging markets like Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) and it only plays downloadable games. It's designed forcost-effectiveness, since publishers can save on packaging and distribution costs (and pass those savings to gamers), but also to combat the piracy that comes with selling disc-based games. And you download games wirelessly via your cell-phone carrier. That's an innovative business model that might actually work. It will be interesting to hear more about this project when the service has gone live from Mike Yuen, Sr. Director, Games Services, Qualcomm, who will deliver a keynote at DMW's upcoming LA Games Conference on April 28-29.

BTW, if you are interested in attending this upcoming prestigious gaming conference in LA, there are still tickets left at the pre-registration rate of $699, so sign up now! It will be a great event. Other keynote speakers include Nolan Bushnell, Founder, Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, CEO of uWink and Chairman, NeoEdge Networks, Mitch Lasky, General Partner, Benchmark Capital and David Roberts, CEO, PopCap Games. Panelists include senior executives from Facebook, MySpace, Electronic Arts, Nokia, Best Buy Paramount Pictures, NBC Universal and many, many more.