[arg_discuss] Re: Develop 2006 + Group Gathering

[Ian Millington (NWI)]

One of the most interesting things about the whole conference (at least what
I saw of it), was a huge swing in interest to broad-demographic games from
AAA titles (partly driven, I think, from the phenominal success of Xbox Live
Arcade). Even down to Phil Harrison (Sony supremo) saying that he worries
about the lack of good broad-demographic games for the next-generation.

Out of the 8 sessions I attended, at least 3 mentioned how $20m+ budgets
mean that there is a huge opporunity for games with great gameplay, but much
smaller cost-to-play and smaller content-creation requirements. This fits
nicely into ARGs which have some degree of both.

The biggest was the keynote, where Mark Rein of Epic, fresh from insulting
Nintendo and saying next-gen games were all about Graphics at E3, wasn't
very complimentary about alternative game development models (although to be
fair I think he was slightly misunderstood on all 3 points). In the
questions afterwards he got variously called a dinosaur, out of touch, and
what's wrong with the industry. I took that to be a good sign!

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=18283


Advertising funded small casual games were also a conversation I ended up
having a couple of times with surprisingly major studio execs. Of course,
excepting EDOC and PPC, that's ARG all over.

As I said in my personal-intro, I'm particularly interested in XME
generally: there was a terminology soup between ARG, XME and  pervasive
gaming at the conference, I noticed - it would be good I suspect to have
some kind of glossary in the whitepaper if possible. Or maybe we should try
to come to a consensus definition of the three terms here on the list - it
would help when trying to sell the idea to the suits.

I agree with Adam there was a big jump forward in how receptive people are
to talking about this and how much credibility they give it for the future.

Ian

--
Ian Millington
Near Worlds Interactive
http://nearworlds.com
UK: (+44/0) 845 123 5715
US: +1 (650) 276 0485

-- 
Ian Millington - IPR Ventures
Email: idm at iprventures.com
Tel: (+44/0)845 123 5715
Web: http://www.iprventures.com