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There’s a lot to see and absorb at GDC (Game Developer’s Conference) but we don’t get to really “see” the stuff until Wednesday when the exhibit hall is open.

The first two day seem to be packed with news (here and there) but a whale of a lot of opportunities to get inside the heads of today’s market leaders and trendsetters.

In addition hands-on type sessions that the 15,000 +/- seem to really thrive on.

It’s a lot different from our Atari years but then the Tramiels’ really weren’t interested in sharing a whole lot of information. Very unlike the breed of ultra-successful and struggling game developers/producers at San Francisco’s Moscone center.

Checking out the program of presentations and classes for this year you see that this generation of game industry folks aren’t afraid to give you a look inside their thought processes and the steps it took them to make the grade. While there’s something for everyone the trails seem to focus on either – multi-level multi-player games (power game system and mobile device capable) or smartphone “games.” Can’t really describe the latter but to say there are a lot of people hoping to produce some modest success with these games or maybe even deliver a whopping success.

Playmatics Session
Because of the written description’s promise of discusing some of the new levels of arcade games we sat in on the Playmatics session. Their approach is the thinking person’s games – palm sweating such as Give Up Robot or mental strain like Grayscale. To help those who paid their own T&E and attendence fees, the speakers described the game play as very, very hard and that was intentional in its design/development. Give Up Robot and other games that were mentioned in passing in the session are forward looking meaning you can can actually proceed to the difficulty level you want and still feel fulfilled. While we tend to focus on the market and segment trends it is interesting that in a masocore game evolutionary process death and respawning are an integral part of the game…rather cool because we were always bummed when we got eliminated. That’s really not such a bad deal! The session speakers seemed to revel in the number of times they died at the game’s various levels which is “a little morbid!” The speakers provided the attendees a lot of the philosophy and psychology of what makes one of these masocore games so successful. The speakers offered some games people can play and analyze to determine how they are going to either simply play to win or start to work on their own masocore challenges.  The games they recommended you study and examine weren’t necessarily masacore titles but did deliver the psychological draw that was necessary for success. They included:

– Space Disposal
– Flyce
– Rubble Trouble
– The Visitor

Zynga Rising
It was easy to see why the GDC attendees packed Zynga’s Mark Skaggs’ session. For crying out loud the company was recently valued at $10 billion with its recent cash infusion so anything you can learn from these people can’t be all bad! If you don’t know it (you probably live under a rock) Zynga is the most popular family of game sites on Facebook. Stuff like Farmville and CityVille has a huge community of members of all ages around the globe paying real money to buy virtual money…cool! Skaggs started out in the early RTS (realtime strategy) part of the industry with a very respectable track record of winners he had been involved with – Red Alert 2, Command and Conquer and yes Lord of the Rings. Like a lot of the attendees bent on developing the next great social media game he and the other developers who worked with him were “green” and learned by doing. While the company fumbled around seemingly going nowhere fast with modest successes. It wasn’t until Bing Gordon, a seasoned executive from Electronic Arts, suggested that they simply make a farm game (yeah like that’s stupid!!).

But the way Skaggs explains it today it seems logical – resource collection/management – what the heck… FarmVille was fast, light, right, shippable.  That seemed to be about it! Their goal was to get to the Facebook market as quickly as possible and garner space and mindshare. Instead of putting the game(s) on their own servers they moved them to the cloud so access/storage capacity could grow as quickly/effortlessly as possible. While FarmVille has grown to reach 32.5 million folks, after its release, their next release – CityVille surpassed 100 million unique users a day in the first six weeks it was on the Facebook market. With earnest advice that was probably worth the cost of attendance for many of the people in attendance he advised them not to try and change the world of social gaming but leverage what works right now. Be creative…borrow!!!!

Indie Games
While the vast majority of the sessions were SRO (standing room only) the Humble Indie Bundle session seemed to have not only more than its unfair shared of attendees but also more people taking serious notes. Started by a bunch of renegades in the indie development community they offered up a bundle of decent to good games that have achieved hundreds of thousands of downloads and provided the “team” with over $3 million in revenue. While the income was far more than they expected the speakers said their success was the result of viral media attention as well as the appeal of pay-what-you-want model. Their site eliminated such things as account registration and shopping carts (which most people seem to abandon anyway) and included a simple PayPal button. Pulling more than a few all-nighters the speakers solved the customer issues and have since then developed one of the best customer support teams in the industry (their words not ours).

While they acknowledge that about a quarter of their bundles have been pirated an anonymous survey showed that those who did it because they couldn’t use credit cards and didn’t have online payment options in their country. But they said the generous people far outweigh the cheapskates so they still feel their approach is valid because they have 15 people who have spent over $1,000 each across the bundles. Based on reviewing their users they feel Linux users are the most generous and the most willing to be as fair as possible. They also feel that by focusing on the Mac and Linux platforms the indie developer can double his/her revenue.

The Humble Indie Bundle speakers weren’t modest about soliciting people to contribute their efforts either saying that if there was good they would love to bundle/promote it. Of course the game has to be good and when they say that they mean good is in the eyes of the beholder… That might not be your game.

Games as Service
There were a number of sessions on the development and success of games as a service. This means offering gamers a fundamental set of features/tools and enabling them to develop/mold the game to fit their wants/needs as well as the people in their sphere. The service type games are never “packaged” so you can move on to the next project. Instead you’re constantly adding new features, enhancing existing features/services and growing the game to keep pace with the community. The objective always is improved customer experience. Tomorrow is another packed day of getting inside the heads of the people who have succeeded hugely or modestly. Great thing is there is also plenty of opportunities for folks to:

– Play with some of the most advanced and “what if” tools in the industry
– Develop new acquaintances and relationships nationally and internationally
– Share ideas and…resumes