Diablo III will have an in game currency auction/buy/trade system that is based around real world moneys. This is good and scary, but it also means people will be even more used to paying money in game for things, which is a boon for my startup!
Cross posted with Communitech and CDMN
When you talk to people outside of our country, ask them what they think of when they think Canada. More than likely they will tell you natural resources. We want people to say Digital Media. We want people to think smarts, talent, technology instead of lumberjacks and tarsands.
Last week I had the good fortune of being able to attend the Digital Interactive Gaming (DIG) Conference in London, Ontario. It was a two-day affair featuring panels, keynotes, success stories and Ontario’s top gaming companies. Also present were a host of educational, government, software, legal and business services organizations
The Canadian Digital Media Network‘s (CDMN) own Glenn Smith had a great presentation describing what the government is trying to do for this country and they are trying to change the way we are viewed by the world. One of the big things that stuck with me, something I never really realized, is that when you talk to people outside of our country, ask them what they think of when they think Canada. More than likely they will tell you natural resources. We want people to say Digital Media. We want people to think smarts, talent, technology instead of lumberjacks and tarsands.
Glenn did a great job of highlighting what the CDMN’s mandate is, why they exist, and how they are helping. He brought up great points about their key collaboration spaces across our country working together in unison, instead of competition. I was happy to provide examples to him of how this was already working, about how my startup and a few other local game companies (Footloose Games, Infinidy and Industry Corporation were meeting with the folks at Ngen in London, about how we were all going to go to DIG together.
I must say it was great to hear that people are working to make Ontario and Canada a better place for game companies.
While the rest of the media industry falls to piracy, games will emerge as the 8th art form
There was a truly riveting and thought provoking talk by Denis Dyack of Silicon Knights first thing on Thursday morning. It started slowly, but swirled together into a masterpiece that widened the eyes of the audience. Mr. Dyack’s clairvoyance and the implications of his thoughts inspired much reflection afterward as we all pondered our futures.
The gist of the talk was that in the future the cloud will be king, that no consoles (save maybe one) will need to exist and that we will subscribe to content channels, like tuning into a television station of branded content. Perhaps his most interesting idea was that Call of Duty was greater than Star Wars. It was a statement that would irk a SW fan, but being one of those fans I could see his point. He pointed out the following:
If you were to place a video camera over someone’s shoulder while they watched Star Wars, you could in fact share most of their experience. If you did the same for someone playing Call of Duty, however, you would only see someone playing Call of Duty, most of their experience would be lost to you.
Dyack’s point was that you cannot copy nor steal an experience, you have to buy it. By providing the ability to play games over the cloud, there is nothing you can steal, no physical copies of games, recordings are meaningless. While the rest of the media industry falls to piracy, games will emerge as the 8th art form. He left us thinking about how cable companies are perched perfectly to cater to this impending shift, as they already have the infrastructure to host nodes in every city of content channels that users can subscribe to. With this model, the cloud can easily scale to demand. Users will subscribe to the EA channel for $15 a month to play EA games, and so forth with other companies.
I could tell that there was a strong community in the gaming world of Southern Ontario
Another great talk I witnessed was the panel on the new social gaming paradigm. It was definitely a raw and real discussion about people currently in the industry making money and what they believe this game space means. On the panel were successful companies making money today and talking about the ethics (or lack thereof), entertainment and psychological effects built into social gaming. It was great to hear things from real people, not just the thousands writing blogs or opinions about how things work.
It was also great that they defined, or at least tried to define, social gaming as a buzz word that doesn’t really mean social. One of my favourite concepts from the panel was that social gaming is akin to giving everyone a disease and then selling them the cure. It really speaks to the psychological tricks that are engineered into these games in order to squeeze more money out of people. They are brilliant, don’t get me wrong, but to argue that these games are even truly “games” is questionable in my opinion.
Probably the best part of DIG was the networking! I got to meet with so many great people from all over the map that share a common thread: they support games. Digital Media is the new buzz word that we gaming companies fall under, but it’s not a bad place to be as the Ontario government is pumping out millions and millions of dollars for support and are helping make Canada the #1 country in the world for Games; we are currently #3.
I missed several panels during the day simply because of the great one-to-one conversations I found myself in. Surprisingly enough I’ve found that the best way to meet people from Waterloo is to find them at events outside the city!
It was also great for me to meet a number of people who I’ve only spoken to only via Twitter. I could definitely tell from the various people at the event that there was a strong community in the gaming world of Southern Ontario, where developers, students, indies and AAA’s alike could engage in casual conversation as if no barriers existed. It’s liberating, exciting and incredibly productive to be in a situation where you can just walk up to the president or executive of a AAA and start talking, asking questions and shooting the shit without feeling like the little guy or that you should be intimidated.
There’s something different about these people that separates them from the rest of industry and I think this something will take us to the next level of success. People just want to make fun games and play fun games and we are all here to help each other do just that.
So I went to the Connecting Talent in Digital Media event last Friday in Mississauga and had a decent time. I can’t remember how I heard about this event, whether it was forwarded to me or I stumbled upon it via the Twitters, but I’m glad I did. I definitely was a great place to get out and meet some people in the Digital Media industry in Southern Ontario. Like the name implies, I assumed there would be a focus on connecting talent, and while most of the presentations were around that subject, it was more about connecting industry and government, or industry and academia, then B2B. They had the foresight to colour code everyone’s IDs so you knew whether the person you were approaching was from Industry, Government or Academia. I must say as someone from the “Industry” group, I felt a little outnumbered.
I managed to talk to a lot of people at various schools, whether student or faculty, and I did meet a few Government people as well, those with access to some money, but for the most part I felt that the event was less for me than it was for the rest. I met a few great industry people, as well as at least one total douche.
Here’s a hint for networking, when starting a conversation don’t tell the other person god I hope that’s not your company name…oh that’s horrible, I’d hate to get big with a name like that, it’s really bad and no one will like it. Bonus points for also emailing before hand: “Who are you and do you have funding”. That’ll get me your business!
Anyways, It was still great to connect with a lot of people and to open some new doors, although I didn’t really find many people who were actually talent looking for jobs. I attended the breakout session on “Various funding opportunities for industry projects”, it seemed the most relevant to me and I learned a little bit that I didn’t know about the funding available from the government, but it seemed like the majority of it wasn’t really that Digital Media focused, unless it was about hiring academia, which I guess isn’t bad, but I don’t think it was really meant that much for gaming startups. I did hear from an OMDC director about how I could use the Export fund to go to trade conferences, something I didn’t think of previously based on the name, but upon asking her afterward about it, it sounded like it isn’t that easy to get either and her example may have been an extraneous circumstance, much to my chagrin. She did mention though that she was glad there was at least some content producers present, which lead me to believe that perhaps I wasn’t the only one who thought things felt a bit lopsided.
I wish more people stuck around afterward for the networking, but it seemed a lot of people just wanted to get out of there, a few left early or at lunch. The lunch keynote from Deloitte was amazing however, all about the Deloitte predictions and they seemed quite sound! One piece of advice I’d give for the next event would be to add more breaks for networking between speakers. It seemed like everyone at the table was dying to meet and talk to one another, but we didn’t get a chance until lunch when everyone got up and left anyway.
Long story short, great to come out to an event and meet some people, learn some stuff!
It seems gaming has got a lot of press in the last year hasn’t it? It seems we’ve stretched the definition of gaming to include things big, small, and those must have features that make your content sticky. Ontario has been making a huge contribution to the local digital media scene and it appears we’ve gone to war with the world to be at the top of the video game creators mountain! Even here in Waterloo Region we are taking it to the next level by introducing the new Digital Media Hub, putting money towards an assortment of digital media companies, and hoping to transform the region and draw in new talent!
A lot of exciting stuff is happening around here in both Waterloo Region and Ontario, and I believe that now is the best time to start a video game company! Everything is coming together and the support is just building and building! That being said, talking about gaming can be hard because it’s such a huge topic, but I’m going to be focusing on what I believe to be the not-so-distant future of PC & browser based gaming, and that’s playing full-on AAA titles right in your browser. Yes, you heard me right, playing the big games right in your browser, without having to go to Steam to download the digital content, without having to wait for 6 gigabytes to download, without even having to go through one big portal site. I’m talking about a new technology being pioneered by Instant Action. Oh and you can also play other games as well, the kind that Flash won’t do.
Instant Action is a new platform upon which game creators can embed their full titles into a YouTube like window in any web page, blog post, or Facebook app. Imagine seeing a video window where within minutes you can start playing some new exciting high end game, where you can grab embed code and share it on your blog for others to see, where you can play for the first level and decide if you want to pay for the next one and rent to own the game?
You might be thinking, that’s not possible, or how could anything be instant for huge games? Without getting too technical, Instant Action is using their proprietary technology to “chunk” the game code such that you can start playing the full game within a few minutes while it does a combination of streaming and downloading of the next few chunks onto your machine so that when you get to the edge of that first downloaded chunk, you can keep playing, it’s like streaming a movie and watching it with only a few minutes of lead time on the progress bar. For most people this will look like magic, people will wonder how you can play such an amazing game simply in the browser, they might not realize they are downloading part of the game and just using their local machine to run it, but they will love it. You can easily full screen the application and check out the controls as well. The only drawbacks that might slow the adoption is the need to download a plugin for the platform to work, but for those serious about playing this may not prove to be as huge a hurdle as the company’s reputation is built up throughout the gaming community.
This new distribution model changes a lot of things for the game creators as it allows them to completely bypass the brick and mortar store front, and it chops off the used games market, which is one of the biggest killers to any game studio. Another great feature of this platform is that it allows for new models of try before you buy. Studios can opt to allow a certain amount of free play time, or the first x levels, and from there the user can buy the next hour, the next level, or something of that nature without having to commit to buying something they may decide they don’t like after a few hours of further play. It’s great for those who want to get a taste of everything, for those who want to quickly and easily buy upgrades, power ups and expansions, and it will take the sour taste out of the gamer’s mouth who just purchased a game that felt like the same thing over and over. I believe this will help and force studios to develop better game that aren’t super-repetitive or built around one mechanic that is initially cool, but gets boring after a few minutes.
The Instant Action platform will allow studios to push their games out online and it will let their own consumers market the snot out of the game for them with the easy embeddable YouTube like windows. Buying a game allows user to play and download anywhere, from any machine, and the payments and transactions are all handled by the platform allowing studios to focus on making the best games they can while the platform handles the money and integration.
We’re going from a world where not long ago we had to drive to the store to buy our PC games to a world where you could buy your games from digital stores like Steam and Impulse to a world where soon you won’t have to download a client and browse a store, you’ll just stumble upon full games embedded in offical press releases and the posts from your favourite game bloggers. Guaranteed as soon as a game hits you’ll see it everywhere and chances are you’ll be playing it before you even thought about if you ever would have tried it in the first place, let alone bought it. Think about the new audience and class of rent-to-own gamers sinking money into games they might have never even looked twice at, and those who don’t even consider themselves gamers. Not only will studios start reaching larger and larger audiences, they’re games are going to be fueled by a viral spread of hobby and professionally written reviews, each with it’s own embedded window to the game.
Making it as easy as possible for consumers to start experiencing the action will definitely be a boon to the video game industry. The simpler and easier it gets for consumers to try and buy, the more sales there will be, the more impulse buyers it will hit, and the more new gamers it will make. Not to mention that Instant Action came prepared for this new wave of frenzied consumption by allowing gamers to play free trials with rent-to-own options making it possible to now profit from those who would have never paid for the full game and for those who never had any alternatives.
So is this going to be the future of gaming on the PC? I believe so. Think about how FarmVille got so successful, think about how many people decided to try the game just because it was there, super easy to access and because all of their friends were already playing it? Even those who would never consider themselves gamers give it a try. Now imagine this scenario again but with actual games with real content and value. I think you can do that math on your own.
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For more information on InstantAction, just Google them and also look up Louis Castle, the CEO (Co-founder of Westwood Studios), he has some great interviews.
I had the good fortune of attending the first of hopefully a full series of Gaming P2P’s at the Accelerator Centre last Tuesday! The P2P was started by Andrew Matlock of the Industry Corporation, a local gaming startup with a game (Partyboat) out on the Xbox Live Indie Marketplace.
I arrived a few minutes early to find there were already some people in the room talking it up, including the organizers, some industry guests and speakers, as well as a few fresh faces. It’s never a bad sign to see some keeners ready to learn and connect!
The P2P got off to a start with some announcements about Communitech and how P2P‘s work from Iain Klugman, local funnyman/hero. We then went around the room and introduced ourselves, titles, and a bit about what we do. It was great to see so many new people in the local gaming community, some that I’ve only heard of online through mass Googling and Linked In hunting! I could see eyes darting around as each name and position was called, people were wondering if the next person be a potential team mate or partner. I was probably the most guilty of this being that I’m hunting for local 3D game programmers! After the intros we had an idea of the wide range of people in the room and the reasons why they were there. We had indies, startups, establisheds, researchers, services, governments, npos, AAA’s and all!
Andrew had a number of speakers lined up and we started with Kim Gibson of the OMDC. She talked about the government funding available through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s programs which included the OMDC Fund and Tax Credit. She couldn’t go into too much detail about it all as it was fairly complicated or not in her area, but we were made aware that there is some good funding available for video game companies in Ontario. In addition to the 2 sources above, there were a few other digital media funds available on their website that you could get funding with. While it was exciting to hear about the money, she also let us know that it’s quite the over-subscribed fund and only about 25% of the applications get funded per year. When quizzed about how easy or hard it would be for the startups in the room to get any money from the fund, she let us know that we had to already have a product out there making revenue or at least have someone with several years of industry experience on our team. It was kind of disappointing to hear that as I imagine most people in the room didn’t meet those criteria, but she did say they saved some money for early stage operations. Since it’s a government fund, it’s all about creating jobs and prosperity for the province, and so for this fund they are really aiming at spinoffs and established companies I believe. Mike Schmalz of Digital Extremes later told us about how those programs have really helped their company and it pays for a good chunk of their employee’s salaries. Kim did mention some info sessions were coming up in July and August for those who wanted to learn more. I can’t wait until I can get access to those resources!
I might not fully remember what order people spoke in, so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but my friend said that Deloitte was next.
Next up was Matt Flood from Deloitte talking about the different funding programs including the OMDC options mentioned earlier, SR&ED and IRAP, as well as a few others. He was nice enough to bring in copies of his presentation for everyone so we wouldn’t have to scribble down notes frantically. It was definitely beneficial to hear about how many programs were out there and I’m sure some of the people in the room were unawares as to how great SR&ED can be for them. Luckily Matt spelled it out for us so we could understand how easy some of the criteria are to meet!
Next up was Mike Schmalz of Digital Extremes, a AAA studio in London Ontario. He walked in late and I thought he looked familiar, but I couldn’t figure out who he was. He was casually dressed in a tshirt and jeans and I would have had no idea he was the President of a game studio (although in retrospect perhaps it makes more sense!). Mike shared a bit about the story of his company, the industry, and what he thinks the future of some different technologies will be. He had some amazing insights and was a very down to earth guy that was genuinely happy to have real discussions with all the people in the room. You could tell he was a guy who likes what he does and wants to help other local game people. I definitely learned a few things about the industry and game design itself that I never really knew, like how little the game studio makes on retail games, compared to the publishers. It sounded almost like the music industry in how the artist usually got very little of the final CD sale, and Mike mentioned that one of his games was a great success selling a large number of copies, yet they still made a loss on it, which is kind of mind blowing! A great little insight that he pointed out was if we ever see a game on sale for $39.99, then the game studio is making no money off of it.
Mike spoke of how piracy hurts the industry and how it’s killing the PC gaming market (which makes me a sad panda) and that console gaming is the best way to protect your game from theft. He mentioned a really interesting thought that most games now have a multiplayer feature in it, and it’s not so much even about the game play or fun, but as a mechanism to make people hold on to their games for longer before reselling them, to reduce the 2nd hand market, which they get no income from.
I think if Andrew didn’t eventually introduce the next speaker, people would have kept asking Mike questions forever! There were a lot of knowledge hungry people in there, and the conversations felt like a true round table experience where everybody wanted to share with everyone else. I guess that makes a good P2P right? I don’t remember the last time I got that feeling so strongly in such a large group!
Last, but not least, was Andy Smith from EA. For those of you who heard EA was in town but had no idea where, they actually bought out a local gaming startup called J2Play, so that explains that! Andy went over a bit of the history of what J2Play did in the social gaming scene and how EA failed and was looking for someone to make a solution for them. It ended up in EA taking over, however they also bought Playfish a short while after and put them in a tough place. Andy talked about social gaming and the scourges (my words, not his) that are upon us like Farmville (I don’t even want to link to it), and other disposable Facebook games (if you can call them that!). He had a lot of great insight into how those games worked, how long their audience lasted, turn over being the highest of any game, some in mere days, and he also talked about the iPhone games marketplace. The key message was that if you don’t get into the top 25 game lists, then it’s pointless to make an iPhone game from a profitability point of view as no one will ever find you on their poorly organized marketplace; you can’t find the good games from the bad. He mentioned how companies like EA have strategies to stay in the top 25, such as when they drop out they reduce the cost of the game and do a bit of marketing to push sales enough that it pops back up there, or if they can’t get back in they just drop it like it’s over.
I believe after this we ran out of time for the group discussion and Andrew quickly concluded the P2P and encouraged us to stick around and connect. I ended up staying for another 30 minutes at least, until a hungry girlfriend called to ask me why I said it would be over at 6pm when it was 6:45 and I was still there. Another sign of a good P2P I guess, it just keeps going and the benefits never end! I was lucky enough to get some time to talk to Mike Schmalz in person for quite some time and got a lot of great insight into what Digital Extremes is up to, how the industry works, and to learn about the origins of the UNREAL brand. I was pretty excited to get to talk to a guy who was part of bringing to life my first and favourite FPS experience: Unreal Tournament! In fact the fast paced action of that game is probably the biggest inspiration for the first game I’m developing in my startup now!
I also got to learn about the game engine, Evolution, that Digital Extremes was working on and how they are trying to help out local game companies by letting them use it on some very easy terms. I’m definitely gonna follow up and find out if the engine makes sense for what I’m doing!
It was also great to meet Jodi Simpson of Tech Alliance in London. I realized later that I was indeed already following them on Twitter and they seem like a Communitech of sorts for the London area. I learned about a cool new incubator they are working on where you can drop in some IP you don’t have time to work on anymore so others can license it and you can collect the royalties! Sounds like a good deal to me!
All in all I would have to say that that was definitely a wicked event and I got a lot of great value and connections out of it. It was great to reconnect with some old faces and meet some new ones as well, and not only local but from nearby AAA studios! If you are into the video game development scene in the Waterloo Region, I would definitely encourage you to come out to the next one and to become a part this great group!
