16 Things I learned from GDC Wednesday

I went to the Game Developers Conference yesterday.

1. Team voice chat is now a commodity, a feature you can buy/rent for your game from companies like GameSpy.
2. Players of team games don't like in-game voice chat.
   • They want to talk with teammates outside of the game before team play (planning, coordination, training) and after (after-action reports, peer feedback).
   • They want to keep their group together independent of a game service. They want the freedom to take their clan/tribe/friends to another world/network.
3. They like the ownership and control Ventrilo offers but don't want its inconvenience and cost.
4. Nobody in GDC's "audio track" is discussing voice chat. They care about designing a game's sounds and score and how to integrate them into the product and the gaming experience.
5. Facebook and asynchronous gameplay have everyone's attention. AAA games are too expensive and slow-to-market unless you are very well funded. "Social games" cost less and make it easier to diversify, experiment and learn from your customers.
6. Interoperability among games and player data portability are not interesting here. I wonder if activity streams might find some fans.
7. Open source? What's open source?
8. Creative commons? Oh, that could save on licensing art and music.
9. Scarce talent? Producers with game experience. Recruiters settle for product managers from non-game software companies and try to reshape them for the game culture. I can't believe CAA doesn't have a practice to represent senior and up-and-coming game talent. By the way, this is a relatively new problem; five years' ago the hunt was for technical and storytelling talent.
10. Auteurs seem to be the hub of studios and publishers collect them, steal them, and shore up their weaknesses.
11. Game studios assemble teams for each stage in a game's life cycle, staffing up and moving people out as needed. The kind of project culture you see in civil engineering and Hollywood. 
12. Like film schools, schools for game makers teach teamwork and collaboration, including when to stab a fellow student in the back and kick the "dead weight" off the team.
13. All the bigger live game companies are building deep pools of knowledge about player behavior, psychology, and how designs affect both. Deep and secret pools of knowledge.
14. Hallway talk is nearly always better than the presentations. Companies compete with secret technologies, designs, and features. This means they only share widely known history and practices. Insights are sparse.
15. Apple's iPad is droolworthy for game developers. Designers are imagining much richer mobile experiences than can fit on a phone's screen.
16. Publishers confront a difficult and costly tradeoff. How do you make each game for every kind of device and user location (iPhone, iPad, PC, Wii, PSP, Xbox, SMS, television, etc.) with a consistent feel and identity while somehow adapting the experience to the strengths and limits of each platform and adding incentives to play across multiple modes? Resources are finite.

tags: gdc, gdc10, gdc2010, games, skype, voip, chat

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photo: cc-by Official GDC