[Editor's Note: Contributing writer Simon Newstead is CEO & Co-Founder of girl avatar game Frenzoo, a 3D fashion startup. He can be contacted at: simon at frenzoo dot com.]
Billing itself as one of a new breed of pure play web publisher, True Games Interactive opened shop at the beginning of 2008 is expanding its team and title list. We invited CEO & Co-Founder Bob Drobish to reflect on their first year and where free-to-play social games are heading.
How did you start True Games and how has the first year been?
We began True Games by stepping back and doing our home work. We looked at player interests, trends in the industry, and the gaps between the two. From that we built a business model and a plan that was compelling enough to attract the best professionals and business partners in the industry.
We were fortunate enough to attract people like Peter Jarvis formerly of NC Soft and Peter Cesario formerly of Namco Bandai. We were also fortunate enough to attract business partners like Petroglyph, GOA, and Possibility Space. Of course, one of the highlights of the year was connecting with global media giant UTV as both an investor and strategic partner. It has been a great year.
Your first game announcement was Warrior Epic. Are you focusing on any particular type or genre of games?
We have exclusively focused on micro-transaction based online games. Our immediate titles are exclusively designed for PC. The two titles that we have announced so far, Warrior Epic (Developed by Possibility Space) and Mytheon (developed by Petroglyph) will be downloadable clients, but with a twist…
From a gamer point of view, are there any synergies between games on your platforms?
Yes, there will be synergies in terms of billing and currency, but we feel that this isn’t the most compelling aspect to gamers. We believe that it is the overall quality of the player experience throughout the full lifecycle of a game that gamers want and need. That being said, our platform will offer user-friendly, mechanical conveniences that will add to the quality of the overall player experience.
How do you view the economic climate and how that will affect the F2P market either good or bad?
The economic climate is of course challenging for us as it is for all business. As an industry however, I think that online, micro-transaction based games offer a uniquely compelling entertainment value proposition. In these economic times, we’d expect that the most cost-effective entertainment options would have an advantage and we think our business model fits into that category. Gamers do not have to spend $60 up front on our games. They can download it at no cost, play as much as wanted with no subscription charges; while having options for micro-transaction purchases.
Is True Games targeting a global audience or focusing on US and English speaking markets?
All the IP’s that we establish are designed with a global audience in mind. Some western markets we will serve directly. Others we will serve through syndication partners with local expertise; but always designed for and distributed to a global audience. Player interest in games is global. The internet is global. So yes, we have developed games from the ground up to cater to players all over the world.
Many believe that old subscription models will give way to pure micro-transaction models, what’s your take?
There is an undeniable trend toward micro-transaction based models. Our research shows that this will continue in the years to come. However, I think the market will continue (at least for the foreseeable future) to offer subscription and micro-transaction based models; in some cases both for the same title. We believe there will be a rise in various hybrids of the two forms. Ultimately, the most successful model will be the one to serve the player best. This will require extensive testing and research.
What is the most exciting development you anticipate in 2009 for the industry?
The most exciting development we anticipate in 2009 (and what our business is built upon) is the launch of AAA games with a free-to-play model. Clearly, there are a lot of free-to-play games and AAA games. However, there is no successful AAA game with a micro-transaction based model in the western market. To develop this will be our most exciting endeavor in 2009-not just for our company but for the industry as well.
[Editor's Note: Contributing writer Simon Newstead is CEO and Co-Founder of Frenzoo, a 3D Fashion startup and the writer of the VR Fashion blog. He can be contacted at: simon at frenzoo dot com.]
Much has been written on why Google pulled the plug on Lively, its 5 month old virtual world.
The consensus, as Google themselves explained, was a need to “focus more on our core search, ads and apps business”.
Most observers viewed the cancellation as a tough but correct decision during a major slowdown in its core online advertising market. Many questioned the launch of the service in the first place. A search company moving into 3D cartoon chat and online gaming without a clear business model seemed a bit of a stretch.
Even Lively engineering manager Niniane Wangadmitted at Virtual Worlds London last month there was still no internal decision on Lively’s virtual economy model - not a great sign for a public service several months after launch.
However there were other factors that also helped contribute to the demise of the Lively service. These may not have grabbed as many headlines, but they had an impact, and not in a good way:
1. Rarity (or lack thereof)
Why do World of Warcraft players grind for hours and hours on end to level up or gain a new weapon or skill? Why do millions of Stardoll fans log in every day just to get their daily StarDollar allowance? Why do Gaia Online users save for months (or plead total strangers) to buy that one special item at the top of their wishlist?
Rarity.
The cardinal rule: make items rare. I.e. require effort and/or money to acquire items, and those items become highly sought after. Desire breeds addiction, addiction plus good, fun gameplay = many repeat visitors.
Yet the day Lively opened its doors, all items in their catalog were free. With that precedent set, nothing “felt” valuable. With that, there was no “desire” factor or goal to strive for - and far less motivation to keep coming back.
This design decision made Lively feel like a “throw away” environment, and users responded in turn.
2. Too powerful and complex an interface
As Ars Technica observed in its launch review, the user interface was difficult.
Unlike Second Life, Lively was designed to be a casual “pick up and go” experience for the mainstream - yet the UI wasn’t designed that way.
For example, many users (myself included) didn’t know how to make our avatars walk around a room.
Frustrated right clicking, left clicking, and hitting arrow keys yielded nothing. It turned out that the way to walk was to hover the mouse over your avatar, then drag and move the mouse to cause your avatar to walk around. Not intuitive.
You might think that the way to solve that was to use a more standard control, for example left click on a place and avatar walks towards it. However this brings up a higher order question: Why was walking even allowed in the first place?
Walking didn’t add anything to the social chat experience except complexity and confusion.
Lively’s competitor and 3D chat leader IMVU recognized this fact and even years after their launch, IMVU doesn’t support avatar walking.
Why?
It doesn’t need to.
3. Too rough, too early
Unlike an unknown startup, anything Google launches to the public is going to attract a day one audience of millions.
That’s what happens when you are the most visited web company in the world. You had better make sure that it’s ready. In Lively’s case, it wasn’t just the lack of Mac support that caused fits among its early user base (although that didn’t help).
It was other issues such as lack of an open content program, leading to a dearth of selections in the store on the first day. A few months would have made all the difference as Google had truly promising and unique content ecosystem in development which could have been a game changer.
It was also many little things:
Anger and confusion greeted a friend who had spent an hour decorating her room, yet returned a few hours later to find strangers had put sofas on the ceiling, tipped over chairs and rearranged plants into a jumbled mess.
All because at launch it was too easy to unknowingly allow others to edit your public room. This and many other small, yet very frustrating user experience issues surely would have been cleaned up with more time in a closed beta.
First impressions count even more in a spotlight.
4. Audience and art
Lively tried to be everything to everyone right from day 1.
Unlike other games based around a theme - be it anime lifestyle in Gaia Online, music in vSide or 3D Avatar Fashion in Frenzoo (disclosure: this is my product) - Google went for an audience of everyone. Or, as Google put it themselves, “Be who you want to be on the web pages you visit.”
This was always going to be an ambitious goal, but it was very difficult to create a cohesive experience with a mix of radically different art styles for the avatars.
In successful services such with Nintendo Mii or Habbo Hotel, there can be plenty of diversity in look but yet a single unmistakable avatar style glues the whole experience together.
However in Lively, you had tiny bears hugging tall skinny cartoon girls, while pigs walked around in circles.
The goal - total freedom of art style - may have been worthy, but put them all together in a chaotic 3D chat environment and the net effect was chaotic and off-putting for users.
5. No profile to call home
It’s an irony that a service that pushed the outer limits of web technology, the most basic social web features such as a profile page, were conspicuously absent.
Nearly every successful online game or web community has a profile page or home screen, as the center of the social experience and to build your own virtual identity - be it for role playing or just making friends.
IMVU’s profile pages are buzzing with user expression and customization, MySpace and Facebook have built their social businesses entirely around profile pages. Yet surprisingly, Lively, which billed itself as the next step in the “social web,” didn’t support web profile pages at launch.
Conclusion
Does the demise of Lively spell the deathknell for virtual worlds?
I don’t believe so. Whilst there has been some excess in hype in parts of the industry, for many players abundant opportunity is still there. The rapid growth of other virtual worlds from IMVU through to Buddypoke and Stardoll and growing revenues seem to bear that out. Not to mention the massive growth in MMO revenues in the past three years.
However in Lively’s case, Google made several big and small mistakes. Combined with a confused business model and no long-term commitment from the Google mothership, this ultimately doomed the otherwise promising service to brief and inglorious lifespan.
The problems could have been fixed and focus found for Lively. IMVU’s first year was plagued with bugs and issues; but as Silicon Alley Insider put it succinctly, in Google’s case they didn’t even try.
FreeToPlay.biz is looking for an insightful industry commentator to join our team. FreeToPlay.biz covers social games, online games and virtual worlds for industry insiders. For more info on who we are, see the “Who is” section of this site.
Our selected writer will be capable of creating news with analysis, crafting fact-supported feature articles and conducting insightful interviews. The job can be done from your laptop anywhere in the world, but some paid travel (i.e. to cover conferences) may be involved.
Application criteria:
Please provide only one submission. Must be online game or core game business related, not a game review.
If you don’t have a submission directly related to the topic, submit your best piece of critical analysis and explain your background/knowledge of the online gaming or core game business.
Must have passion for business side of the game industry, be professional and articulate and available to post with consistency and meet editorial deadlines.
Regular online writing rates apply, with performance bonuses.
Please review some our most popular posts (here, here and here) to get an idea of what we’re looking for before applying.
Express your interest by sending the aforementioned materials to:
The job market seems as hot as ever. As a result, I’ve had a few interesting free-to-play related jobs flitter through my inbox this week.
David Perry, Chief Creative Officer of Acclaim (in that company’s new, F2P-only format) and Kyra Reppen, SVP of Nickelodeon, send word of very compelling vacancies in their respective companies. Nickelodeon’s posting is based in LA whereas Acclaim seems open to remote-work scenarios. Kudos to Acclaim!
I promised I’d post their opps on freetoplay.biz. Click through for the full text of each posting.
Been very busy on the consulting front lately… apologies for the lack of content. But I promised Nicolo I would post this job for him, so here goes:
At this year’s GDC, I met Michael Ivvora and Nicolo Laurent from GOA, the videogame subsidiary of France Telecom/Orange.Besides handling the European side of US online games – launch, localization, QA, support etc – for games like Warhammer Online and Dark Age of Camelot, Orange also runs a free to play portal at goa.com.They’ve recently launched localized free to play games in Europe like Gunbound and Pangya, and they’ve got plans to expand their game selection.
Right now they’re looking for an Operational Manager for their free to play business, which is based out of Dublin, Ireland.This is a lead managerial position, which means leading the vision for their free to play business, managing project managers and organizing work flow between game teams.It also means working closely with the marketing team to develop strategies for customer acquisition, conversion, retention and monetization, along with managing the alignment of development and marketing goals.
Warrior Epic is a new free to play online RPG being developed by Possibility Space, a company founded by Gage Galinger and Feng Zhu; a pair that share a wealth of experience between them, from Starcraft to Gears of War.
As a free to play game it comes across as competent and quite polished, and it’s just leaving closed beta. Essentially a dungeon crawler, players own a great hall that stores their characters and serves as a meeting place for quests.
There are a number of different warrior classes (and some that must be paid for), but the hook is a sort of metagame wherein players can choose to harness the spirit of one of their fallen warriors as a power for their next warrior. It’s well scoped and well designed to be a free to play RPG, but what’s most interesting is how they plan to handle paid content and digital downloading.
While the usual cosmetic items are part of the plan, Warrior Epic is taking a refreshing stance towards satisfying both free players and paid players – a problem Flagship’s Hellgate London ran into when they offered paid players better gear, bigger inventories and faster travel times.
Brice Lukas, Community Manager for Possibilty Space had this to say about sustaining that balance:
“In Warrior Epic you cannot purchase power or progress. The best gear and items can only be obtained by playing the game. There is also no exchange of earned items with paid items. So anything that a user buys with real cash cannot be obtained with in-game currency.”
One of the things a player can purchase (for a small price) are buff items that will help players get through dungeons and closer to the real loot.
“Each mission in Warrior Epic is designed to be roughly 15 minutes long, and the number of these buffs you can carry is limited, so they will not unbalance the play.”
Last but not least is Possibility Space’s distribution model, what the company has dubbed “Download on Demand”. Players register on the site and then download a small .exe file that will stream content from seed servers. The whole system is similar to torrents and is expected to allow the game to be quite portable. Since account information is stored on the seed servers, players can download the same .exe on any computer, which is run from the folder it’s in rather than needing an install.
We’ll have to wait and see if Warrior Epic proves to be a game that lets players download and start playing within minutes, but it’s safe to say that players will appreciate the lack of usual hoops to jump through. The more players get exposed to a free to play game the better, and with an approach like this there is a good chance that a significant amount of players will at least consider getting involved enough to start paying for items and warriors.
“Our intention is to expose a much larger set of people to the fun of online gaming. We want to take all the fun parts of games that hardcore gamers enjoy, and package those up in a product that everybody can experience. The key behind this is to lower the barrier to entry.”
A few hundred people watched my Red Bull-fueled version of this presentation on Monday, February 18th at GDC. The narration included in this slidecast was done this weekend and is not nearly as energetic.
In the interest of playing devil’s advocate, I thought I’d throw out 10 reasons why free to play might be slower to succeed in the Western world as it has been in Asia.
While I don’t necessarily believe all of these will inhibit F2P’s growth, one of the slides in my GDC presentation this year is to do with the challenges F2P faces - so this should help fulfill that requirement.
1. Virtual Property “Ownership”
The term ‘virtual’ may not have a strict legal interpretation, but if anything it means that the thing being described is NOT whatever comes after the word ‘virtual.
- Ginsu Yoong, Second Life’s legal counsel, Linden v Bragg
Despite virtual property’s ill-defined legal status, developers have had no qualms about starting byzantine in-game economies driven by the exchange of real money for virtual land, clothing, furniture and much more.
Some developers, like GoPets CEO Eric Bethke, have attempted to get out in front of the virtual property legal issue by defining their own “Avatar Bill of Rights.” But most of us have not been as proactive and instead seem content to leave it up to the courts to decide how to define and deal with our users’ virtual property.
As precedents regarding virtual ownership are set, the growth of some F2P products may be curtailed as the legal burden of dispensing virtual property increases.
2. Slow Broadband
On the issue of net speed, there remains a huge disparity between North America’s broadband ISPs and Korea’s military-grade internet provision.
The net effect is that free to play games like Maple Story can take 1-3 hours or more to download in North America, while Korea’s 45mbps network cuts the same download to a paltry 10 minutes or less.
It’s fair to say that we won’t soon be getting such high download speeds - but the North American market might have already found a way around the issue. With the launch of streaming game services like InstantAction and the proliferation of Flash as a full-blown development platform, downloading entire game clients become less and less the norm.
3. Poor Advertising Strategies
Some products in the F2P sector have come to rely heavily on advertiser support in order to keep their offerings free for the majority of players.
A recent OMMA article that claims advertisers are taking the wrong approach when handling virtual worlds. And as the populations of virtual worlds appear to be prematurely plateauing, advertisers may be starting to sweat.
But there is hope if advertisers change their strategies to suit the unique challenges virtual worlds present. As Worlds In Motion put it:
…themed events, branded avatar clothing, and representative personality appearances are finding success and opportunity in worlds like There, Habbo and vSide.
4. MMO Overload From Maple Story to Silkroad Online, there is no shortage of MMOs in the free to play space. In the same vein, there is an abundance of virtual worlds such as Second Life or Kaneva. It seems as though the vast majority of new free to play game since 2005 have been virtual worlds or MMOs.
Perhaps it’s the very reason that these games have proliferated in the free to play market; MMOs and virtual worlds are inherently more inclusive than an FPS. Still, it would be a shame to see the free to play space flounder due to constant reiteration of the same genres and themes, turning away players seeking a different experience.
Of course, games like Kwari are looking to change that, but it’s too early to tell just how well they will catch on.
5. Rising Development Costs With more prominent developers announcing plans to take advantage of the free to play model, the days of games fueled by ramen noodles and nights in the basement could, once again, be history. EA’s upcoming Battlefield Heroes is the latest big budget free to play game, signaling that the big publishers aren’t content to sit back and let Far East imports eat their lunch.
If the consumer makes the jump from 2D to more advanced 3D graphics, it could mean the end of the visually rudimentary worlds and Flash-based free to play games as market leaders, making way for the mainstream big budget games.
6. Second Life Slowdown Second Life is the Apple Newton of virtual worlds. It was here first, but isn’t the best representation of the potential of virtual worlds. However, it still occupies a place in investors’ minds - akin to a coal mine canary, warning of impending danger.
And while investors took note as Second Life soared to the top, they’re noticing its decline as well (active user hours were down 5% in November). There is concern among some that Second Life’s time might be up, and that’s not a good sign for potential investors in the free to play space.
7. Watered Down AdverWorlds With their lower barrier to entry and great potential to spin money, an slew of less innovative products are beginning to hit the market. Hardest to ignore are adverworlds like Build-A-Bear, Rush Zone, BeBratz, BarbieGirls and their ilk - marketing spend thinly disguised as entertainment.
The consumer’s willingness to pay money for virtual items in a world where their avatar is little more than a target for advertising will be tested by products like these.
8. Unsanctioned Secondary Markets Then there’s the issue of gold farming. With websites like IGE operating independently of game developers and establishing secondary markets for game currency and items, it’s not just traditional MMOs that are being subjected to this kind of treatment anymore.
What’s worse, while gold farming might fuddle with World of Warcraft’s player-driven economy, some developers believe a secondary market allows players to skip the middleman altogether - a potentially fatal issue for free to play games who survive on item-based revenue streams.
The recent launch of publisher-sanctioned Live Gamer is a step in the right direction for devs and pubs looking to reclaim lost revenue.
9. Limited Payment Methods
We have hanging on our wall a user who sent a $5 bill in a $15 fedEx package.
- Craig Sherman, Gaia Online
While other territories enjoy a plethora of tailored-to-the-consumer payment methods, North America has embraced relatively few.
SMS would surely be nearly as popular a payment method here as it is in Europe if our carrier surcharges weren’t in the range of 50% a transaction. Landlines - an expensive but very secure payment option in China - might also be popular with some services.
GoPets has 90 different payment systems worldwide, catering excellently to foreign payment preferences. Nonetheless, consumers still have trouble getting money into their favorite North American games.
10. Kids OnlyGames
The current offering of free to play games caters nearly exclusively to the under-25 set. An NPD study released last year showed that while 91% of online gaming among kids aged 2-17 is free to play, by the time those kids graduated high school, the boys had moved to sixty-dollar console games and the girls dropped out of gaming entirely.
In the core gaming arena, Nintendo has found a way to appeal to young and old alike. Free to play’s appeal among adults relies on the proliferation of products that do a Nintendo-quality job of bridging the age gap or target older demographics only.
OnNet USA is the American subsidiary of OnNet Korea a developer of multiple free to play online games. The American branch of the company acts solely as a publisher through their portal site Games Campus.
Today, OnNet releases their newest game, a free to play third person shooter titled Manga Fighter. We spoke to YJ, Manga Fighter’s Producer, about the project and the free to play model in general.
What is the relationship between OnNet Korea and OnNet USA?
OnNet Korea is an software developer creating search engines and other similar products. OnNet USA is an online publisher of free to play games. They’re two different ideas with two distinct identities.
OnNet USA opened it’s doors three years ago with the launch of our golf game Shot Online.
What did you learn from that experience and what has been carried over to Manga Fighter?
We weren’t very well organized which was a big challenge so this time out we made sure to have the proper management in place. That’s the real risk area with a project like this you need excellent management.
The other important lesson concerning constant content updating. With a free to play game and a virtual goods revenue model you have to make sure that there is always new content for the players. We found that to be the key to player retention.
It’s hard to discuss MMOs without mentioning secondary markets for virtual goods and currency. What are your thoughts?
We’re very aware of the secondary markets and the emerging issues associated with them. At this point we’re taking a neutral stance and kind of waiting to see what the industry trend as a whole is.
Why have the global launch of a manga style game with the virtual goods model in America. Why not use the Korean market where both of those things are more mainstream?
Well in a lot of ways this is a new game for any market. It’s a fast-paced third person shooter aimed at a younger audience and there’s not much out there like that. We believe the US is a great testing ground for our new content.
Just three years ago, some declared the free to play model wouldn’t work. Today it’s beginning to get big. It’s not quite mainstream yet but we’re heading in that direction and America is a huge potential market. There are a lot of gamers in America.
What about the release cycle. OnNet ran two beta tests and a boot camp? What was that?
The Boot Camp was just a term for our third beta. In fact even now that we’ve opened the game up we still haven’t implemented all the commerce aspects of the game. This is more like an open beta and then we’ll see how the market responds before launching the money aspect.
What kind of marketing has gone into the launch of the game?
We haven’t done any big budget marketing campaigns but viral marketing has worked well for us. We’re also mailing collectible cards to players with a code on them. The code unlocks premium content in Manga Fighter and down the road we’re looking at getting these cards into retail outlets.
The other thing we’re excited about is the possibility of getting some famous faces from the rest of the manga universe in game. I can’t release any details yet but we’re in discussion with some major publishers.
Thanks for your time YJ and good luck with the launch of Manga Fighter.
I spent a couple hours today pretending I had infinite time and money to attend free to play-relevant conferences the world over. The result is this list of the top 10 conferences for those who want a crash course on F2P development and a slew of contacts in the sector.
Over the last year, there’s been a deluge of new virtual worlds conferences, but not all are created equal. So in addition to sorting on quality, I decided to sort for those that were at least partially geared toward English speakers.
Some of the following conferences occurred in the past, but have been included in the hopes that they become annual affairs.
The Virtual Goods Summit is a one day conference focused on the emerging market opportunity for virtual goods and economies. Once restricted to the world of online gaming, virtual goods and currencies are beginning to influence the development of social networks, community sites, and many other new and exciting markets.
The Virtual Goods Summit was a one day affair at the Annenberg Auditorium featuring a series of one hour panel discussions and presentations. Notable speakers included the CEO’s of Gaia Online, Three Rings, Kongregate, GoPets and K2 as well as the Director of Business Development at Nexon. The topics discussed included virtual goods as the next big business model, industry success stories and the forces driving user adoption.
Our pan-European virtual worlds confex connected brands, major corporations, digital and virtual worlds agencies, media and entertainment players and games companies, technology suppliers, analysts and commentators, lawyers, regulators and venture capitalists and all those harnessing the power of virtual worlds to engage with clients, suppliers or customers.
The Virtual Worlds Forum lasted two days and was by no means focused just on games. The keynotes and panel discussions we’re about many things including brand recognition, corporate opportunity and revenue possibilities. Panelists included Paul Hemp- Senior Editor, Harvard Business Review; Ginsu Yoon- SVP International, Linden Lab and Thomas Bidaux- Director of Product Development, NCSoft Europe.
Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo helps businesses harness the power of virtual worlds to engage with their customers, partners and employees. The event follows our sold out Virtual Worlds Spring New York conference.
Speakers from this year’s conference included Paul Yanover, VP and Managing Director at Disney and Anthony Zuicker- creator of CSI. The event featured hundreds of speakers overall and some major corporate support. This year six streams will be available with an emphasis on the financial and operational aspects of virtual worlds. Where as some of the conferences on this list are art or design orientated the Virtual World Conference seems to be strait business.
If you are going to attend one industry event in 2008, this is the one. The core objective of this year’s conference is to promote Learning, Networking, and Inspiration. The GDC team has been working hard to create the most exciting and compelling conference yet. Most notably, we have adjusted the timing for the call for papers forward to ensure that we’re presenting you with the most up-to-date topics facing game developers today. You won’t be disappointed.
The GDC isn’t exclusively interesting to free to play followers but in the wake of E3’s fall from grace this is the game industry’s flagship event.
Also at GDC is the Worlds in Motion Summit debuting this year, an event focused on virtual worlds. FreeToPlay.biz was asked to speak at the Worlds in Motion Summit and as a result, Adrian Crook will be presenting a primer on the F2P revenue model at the event. Also giving talks are Raph Koster, Nabeel Hyatt, Eric Bethke, Min Kim, Chris Romero and others - making this a great conference for the F2P sector.
IMGDC is a venue for Independent designers and developers to come together to share ideas and learn in all areas related to MMOGs. IMGDC 2.0 has positioned itself to be an even larger venue with three fantastic tracks covering design, development and business aspects of Indie MMOGs. The present is a time of MMOG giants, but the future lies in the hands of the passionate Indie developers. Do you have the passion?
2008 will be the second year for the IMGDC featuring presentations from Richard Bartle author of Designing Virtual Worlds, Raph Koster and Gordon Walton who was previously VP/Exec Producer at Sony Online Entertainment, Maxis, Origin Systems and Kesmai Corporation.
The SXSW Interactive Festival features five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties. Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology. Whether you are a hard-core geek, a dedicated content creator, a new media entrepreneur, or just someone who likes being around an extremely creative community, SXSW Interactive is for you!
Though SXSW doesn’t provide a ton of events catering specifically to the free to play crowd, it is a phenomenal collection of creative people working in emergent digital entertainment fields. Couple this with the fact that the event is part of North America’s largest music festival and party and attendance seems like more than a good idea.
The Austin Game Developers Conference attracts over 1,100 attendees and provides educational, networking, and business opportunities for game development professionals driving the $11 billion videogame industry. It is the a global forum where programmers, artists, producers, game designers, audio professionals and others involved in the development of interactive games gather to exchange ideas, network, and shape the future of the industry.
Austin GDC has become synonymous with MMO design due primarily to the city’s deep MMO development scene. The conference features talks and panels focused on free to play, “Web 2.o,” MMO development and micro-transactional revenue models.
Building on the great success of the 2007 conference, OGDC 2008 will expand the plenary sessions from two to three days, and feature a wide range of keynotes, sessions, and panels, giving attendees new views of the online game universe—everything from an overview of the latest business, product, and legal developments to in-depth looks at scalability, player psychology, and in-game economic systems.
This event features Erik Bethke, founder and CEO of GoPets; Alan Crosby director of global community relations at Sony Online and Steve Goldstein of Flagships Studios. 2007’s OGDC was a good start - hopefully 2008 is a big step forward.
9) Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008 April 6-10 2008 - Las Vegas
Each year, Symposium/ITxpo: Emerging Trends is founded on a framework of six megatrends that Gartner sees as critical to how business and technology will evolve in the near and long term.
A mere sampling of the trends and technologies we’ll focus on includes:
User Generated Content
Social Networking
Community Source
The Metaverse
Relationship Assets
Hyperconnected Enterprise
Collective Intelligence
Gartner attracts a different crowd from the game-centric conferences listed here. Typically, Gartner attendees come from the IT or VC worlds. The value of Gartner attendance lies not in the curriculum, but in your fellow attendees.
The 6th Video Game seminar as part of IDATE’s DigiWorld Summit 2007, is organised with financial support from the City of Montpellier. A host of opportunities have opened up over the past two years: the development of serious games, Massively Multiplayer Games and persistent universes, online capabilities incorporated as standard features in home consoles, the emergence and growth of mobile gaming, the development of online poker that’s been as swift as it has been surprising… All constituting innovative technologies and ways to play which, in this era of growing convergence, involve or induce an overhaul of business models.
I’m sure I missed some relevant conferences, so if you can think of any leave a comment for our other readers.
Billing itself as one of a new breed of pure play web publisher, True Games Interactive opened shop at the beginning of 2008 is expanding its team and title list. We invited CEO & Co-Founder Bob Drobish to reflect on their first year and where free-to-play social games are heading.
OnNet USA