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November 08, 2005
Shockwave Turns Ten - Content Contest Announcement
December of 2005 marks an important milestone in the history of the Shockwave Player, specifically it's the ten year anniversary of the it's first public release in 1995. In order to help celebrate we are hosting a contest to highlight the best and/or most memorable examples of Shockwave content throughout the years. We are opening the doors to everyone to submit their own content pieces for consideration. The top ten will be selected by members of the Director and Shockwave team here at Macromedia, and then featured as part of our Shockwave anniversary promotional efforts. In addition, the top 3 pieces in particular will win the following prizes:
Third Place
Rio Karma 20GB MP3 player -- $199 Retail
Second Place
Konica Minolta DiMAGE Xt "World's Slimmest" 3MP Digital Camera -- $299 Retail
First Place
Canon PowerShot S50 5MP Digital Camera -- $699 retail
We're looking for content that spans Shockwave player's history so reach back into those archives, break out those dusty floppy disks and see what you can turn up. Are you interested in submitting a piece of your own content? If so, then please send me the following information:
1. URL(s) for where I can view and download the content in question. If your project involves multiple files then please do your best to package those up for easier download (zip, sit, hqx, etc.). At this time I don't necessarily need your source files but please indicate to me whether you have access to those or not in case we do need them later on.
2. A description of the content itself, how it was used by you or your client, why you feel it's an important piece of Shockwave history or a good example of the technology and how it has been used over time.
3. Please note that in submitting this content you will need to provide us the rights to use the content in our Shockwave Anniversary promotion. In your submission please indicate whether you are currently able to provide us the rights to use the content or whether you will need to consult with others first. Once we have submissions in and selected we can then begin the official process of securing those rights via appropriate channels.
4. Your contact information.
Please provide the above information by filling out the following PDF form and then pressing the submit button (found in the form document itself):
Submit your entries directly to me, Tom Higgins, via email at thiggins@macromedia.com, all entries must be received by 5:00pm Pacific Time on Friday, November 18, 2005. Winning entries will be announced on the anniversary promotion pages on December 1, 2005. If there are any questions about this contest please don't hesitate to ask, you can send those questions directly to me by email at thiggins@macromedia.com or by posting comments to this blog entry.
Thanks for everyone's support of both Macromedia Director and the Shockwave Player throughout the years, and of course good luck to those that submit entries for the contest!
Posted by thiggins at 10:39 AM
In-Game Advertising for the Casual Games Market
An obviously important item in any software development field is revenue, how does one go about making sufficient revenue in order to fund continued development of content? In the casual games space there are many ways in which folks are driving revenue, subscription services that offer games for a monthly fee, pay-per-play or games that offer a free trial download followed by an offer to purchase the full version, and so on... But one revenue stream that seems to be cropping up more and more lately is in-game advertising. This is advertising that's built right into the game much like we've started to see in movies. For example, imagine you're playing a car driving game and you're driving along a highway and the billboards going by have actual sponsor ads on them. It's an interesting option for those in the games development world, especially those that have sufficiently high traffic levels to command good advertising prices. ;) Here are few articles that appears in my Google Alerts today, they all discuss how shockwave.com is adopting this advertising mechanism in some of their game titles:
Shockwave launches in-game advertising
Shockwave Brings In-Game Ads to Online Casual Games
Ads Start To Pop Up In Web-Based Games
I think for myself this is a good opportunity to keep an eye on both in terms of revenue potential for games developers but also in terms of ensuring that the game play experience isn't degraded too much. While I personally wouldn't mind billboards and whatnot to appear with real ads in the games I play, I don't want to feel as if the game is one giant commercial.
Eh, food for thought. Read the articles above as they will hopefully get the juices flowing in your own mind about how you feel about (for or against) this new way of driving revenue.
Enjoy.
Posted by thiggins at 09:52 AM
November 02, 2005
3D photo gallery? Once again, you CanDo it!
Ok, I've used that "you CanDo it" twice now so I promise I'll stop that. But while I've got your attention you might want to have a look at CanDo Interactive's latest offering, their Visual Art Gallery Creator. As of today the creator application is Windows-only but the resulting gallery is viewable by users on both Macintosh and Windows machines. It's currently beta-software and free for you to test drive, give it a look:
If you'd first prefer to view an example gallery then take a look at this one created by Mal at CanDo Interactive, it's his two-minute special (his words!):
Enjoy!
Posted by thiggins at 03:26 PM
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 11:07 AM
Director + Flash Communication Server : the basics
I have a number of Google alerts set-up so that I get daily news on certain keywords via email. Due to one of those alerts I managed to come across what appears to be a good introductory article that walks you through the basics of connecting to a Flash Communication Server from within a Director project using Lingo. For those looking for a good step-by-step tutorial on making the basic shared text (chat) or shared ball demos, I think is worth a read.
Enjoy.
Note: please be aware that there is a name change pending for newer versions of the Flash Communication Server MX 1.5, specifically the announced major version update soon to be released is called Flash Media Server 2.0. I'm mentioning this just to plant the seed so that later on folks might be less confused by the product name change. I will likely update the category name used here in my blog to reflect the new product name when it does ship.
Posted by thiggins at 08:55 AM