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November 02, 2005
Go Casual! - Austin Game Conference Report
Last week I posted a blog entry about the fact that was off to attend and speak at the Austin Games Conference. Now that I'm back and the conference is over I figured it was time to write up a quick summary of how things went and what I took away from the conference.
Thanks GameTrust!
To start, it's worth noting that without the folks at GameTrust I wouldn't have had the opportunity to attend and speak at this event, nor would there have been such a good focus on casual games development in specific. The Austin Games Conference seems to have been historically focused on what I'll refer to as traditional games development, meaning heavy titles for either PC or console users. The trouble with that sort of focus is that it overlooks the large and growing casual games market that is heavy into the sort of technologies Macromedia as well as others have to offer. The GameTrust folks brought their "A" game in this respect, they had a huge inflatable white gorilla, a guy in a white gorilla costume walking around and their staff in t-shirts, all of which offered the "Go Casual!" tagline. I say they brought their "A" game as I noticed a huge interest in casual games from those in attendance, from both current and future developers as well as portal site and technology representatives. It's very hard to turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to a market segment currently generating hundreds of millions of dollars annually and that's expected to grow into the billions over the coming years[1].
Moving Beyond Downloads
There were two sessions in particular that I attended and/or spoke at and both were part of the Next Generation Game Development track. The first of those two sessions was one that I merely attended, it was titled "Casual Game Evolution Summit: Moving Beyond Downloads" and it involved a fantastic panel of folks involved in the casual games industry today. The speakers for that session were Peter Glover from shockwave.com, Margaret Wallace from Skunk Studios, Mark Cottom from Mumbo Jumbo, Brian Robbins from Fuel Industries, Juan Gril from Joju Games and Adeo Ressi from GameTrust as the moderator. With that panel there was a good assortment of folks covering the industry today and they did not disappoint the crowd. The discussion focused on trying to define the term "casual games" and to give the audience some ideas as to what the business of casual games is like. In all the types of comments provided were very enlightening and provided some good insight into what folks should expect:
1. Defining "casual games" is difficult, it spans from titles that are quick and easy to learn (low commitment level to get started) to a more general notion of having "mass appeal" outside the hard-core gamer market. In general there did seem a solid consensus in that all folks viewed casual games as being those targetting the widest range of users possible and that's a huge shift from traditional "high end" game development that caters to very specific gaming segments.
2. There are many ways to go about your business. This was exemplified by the differences in how folks obtained revenue, whether it was via ad-share revenue via game portals or via corporate advergaming development. It was also very interesting to hear from Mark Cottam on how they've taken casual games to the store shelf and have had a good deal of success, thus breaking (me at least!) free from the notion that "casual" definitively means "online" or "downloadable online". It doesn't, the business spans from the browser, to your desktop, to devices and on out to boxed product on a store shelf.
3. Everyone agreed that the casual games business is a looming opportunity that will only grow in the coming years. Just a few years ago the notion of casual games being an industry itself would likely have been laughed at, especially if one tried to claim that revenue numbers from casual games would soon be approaching levels similar to traditional games (high-end PC or console titles).
So from this first session I took away some new thoughts about what makes a casual game and how/where one might look to drive revenue from such titles. I had fallen prey myself to certain pre-conceived notions and so this served as a great reality check, and one that comes from people doing it today with great success.
Tech Today for Tomorrow’s Hit
The second session was one in which I was a panelist, and that session was titled "Casual Game Evolution Summit: Tech Today for Tomorrow’s Hit" and it focused on technology choices folks must make when developing casual game titles. The panel group for this session included myself as a representative from Macromedia on both Director/Shockwave and Flash, Chris Melissinos from Sun Microsystems, Peter Glover from shockwave.com, Brian Robbins from Fuel Industries and Adeo Ressi from GameTrust as the moderator. This session proved interesting as it had both Chris and myself touting our respective technologies while at the same time allowing both Peter and Brian to both support and potentially debunk our claims. The upshot of this session seems to have been that all the represented technologies, Director and Shockwave, Flash and Java, all provide distinct benefits to the casual games developer in that they offer robust functionality with wide-reaching deployment opportunities. That having been said we also surmised that each technology has work yet to be done in order to stand clear as THE choice to use. So while I'm definitely here to tell you that I feel Director and Shockwave, and Flash, are all better than Java for casual games development, Chris did throw out some good arguments in favor of Java as well that made me think. Some important points I took away from all this were:
1. Director and Flash are a leg-up on Java in terms of the types of authoring environment we provide, but having said that our authoring environments are far from perfect and as such we need to continuously keep our eye on improving that experience. Our products are also a leg-up in terms of the types of experiences possible, whether that's media rich content including video, audio, 3D, etc., to client-server technologies that allow for multiplayer game development or multiparticipant applications. Another key advantage we have is that our tools allow both web-based and downloadable executable development in a far easier manner than does Java.
2. While folks are obviously keen on delivering to existing desktop platforms there is a lot of interest in going mobile, whether that's on cell phones and PDA's or on more gaming specific devices like Sony's PSP. Thus all the technologies discussed need to keep some focus on the device space and as such that points out a bit of a weakness for Director and Shockwave in particular (both Flash and Java have in-roads into the device world already).
3. We all need to be more diligent about staying on top of technology news. For example, I had no idea how extensive the 3D capabilities are for Java developers, and in return Chris said he wasn't fully up to speed on Director and Shockwave's 3D capabilities. I don't think this has anything to do with either of us (or any of you) being lazy so much as it has to do with the ever changing face of technology. It's a lot of work to stay up to speed on so many fronts, but it's important for all of us in the casual games space given how much growth and change is occurring and around the corner.
4. Product specific woes are hurting Director and Shockwave, most notably our installation penetration (for Shockwave hovering around the 54% mark worldwide[2]), our lack of being pre-installed with Windows operating systems and of course our current install process. None of those are news to me as I'm very aware of these having been mentioned by our existing user base, but having to discuss those in front of new potential developers was another rough reminder of how far we still have to go.
Wrap it up Tom...
Beyond the two sessions above I didn't take too much else away from what I saw on the conference floor. A good part of the conference and the booths that were there seemed geared towards recruiting and so I wasn't able to learn much from a technology evaluation perspective. The one exception to that was the fact that I had a chance to talk to a pair of guys from TransGaming Technologies, Gavriel and Eric. Those two showed me some *incredible* demonstrations of technologies they are working on, most importantly was a demo of their SwiftShader rendering engine. It is entirely software-based and it blew me away in terms of render quality, features and performance. These are some guys that I'll definitely keep in touch with going forward!
I'd like to close out this lengthy post with a big thanks for the folks at GameTrust, they not only sponsored and drove the casual games agenda at this conference but the provided some good times the night before by hosting a dinner for the panel speakers. I expected to sit down at dinner with the group and talk shop, you know, about games development and the market in general. Instead we had an incredible discussion about bio-ethics and genome mapping efforts, a completely unexpected but welcome break from my normal dinner discussion topics. All in all I had a great time, hopefully next year I'll be there again but for more than a scant 24 hours, I'd like to see if Austin lives up to the good night-life reputation I keep hearing about. :)
Other blogs discussing these sessions and the Austin Game Conference:
Brian Robbins - Fuel Industries
[1]Data taken from 2005 Casual Games Whitepaper, page 12, IGDA Casual Games SIG.
[2]Data taken from the recent NPD survey data for the Shockwave player on macromedia.com.
Posted by thiggins at November 2, 2005 11:07 AM