Day two of the GDC was full of interesting panel discussions and product announcements. Below we have summarised some of the biggest discussions and announcements to emerge from the day.
Hot Topic: Infinity Ward lawsuit
EA Chief Operations Officer John Schappert weighed in with his opinion on the emerging legal dispute between Activision and the (now former) Infinity Ward studio heads Vince Zampella and Jason West, saying that he doesn’t think it is good for the industry overall.
Schappert even postulated that the future of the Modern Warfare franchise may be at stake.
Schappert described Activision as a company that would rather litigate than make games, citing the Brutal Legend dispute in which EA became embroiled after Activision dropped the title.
Moving on to the topic of the future of disc based gaming, Schappert still holds stock in physical media distribution. He described EA’s strategies of releasing DLC to supplement sales which all start with a shiny disc. Having said that, Schappert also pointed out that EA hasn’t been slouching in the digital downloads arena, and has also acquired some social networking game developers.
Lunch With Luminaries
This panel discussion roamed across a broad range of topics. Veteran designer Warren Spector (Wing Commander series, Ultima series, Thief: The Dark Project, Deus Ex) threw some speculation over the gesture based motion controller movement in console gaming.
Spector believes that after 30 years of getting comfortable with a standard gamepad, the industry shouldn’t be too hasty to move on to ‘the next big thing.’ In light of his upcoming motion controlled Wii title Epic Mickey, Spector clarified that he isn’t against motion controllers, but just doesn’t want to see them becoming dominant.
IGN president Roy Bahat and EA chief creative director Rich Hilleman engaged in some armchair etymology, discussing the term ‘gamer.’
The pair theorised whether the ‘gamer’ label was limiting the way the industry markets itself in some way. Citing a recent IGN poll, Bahat indicated that even a group who would be considered ‘hardcore’ gamers, didn’t think to label themselves as such until prompted. The bottom line of the discussion was that the industry may be trying too hard to define the ‘gamer’ on the gamer’s behalf.
Development Discussions
As one would expect, numerous development oriented discussions took place throughout the day. Kellee Santiago and Robin Hunicke from studio ThatGameCompany, developers of the PSN hit Flower, discussed the advantages of a process of exploratory development with long prototyping periods.
As if to prove this point, Daniel Benmergui discussed his 2010 IGF Nuovo finalist game, Today I Die, at the Indie Games Summit.
Benmergui described the organic development process he followed, from practically having no idea other than a desire to create a game, to developing a number of prototypes with features that were scrapped and the brought back in, until six months down the line he had a release version of Today I Die.
iPhone developer Oliver Miao from EA Mobile discussed the emergence of micro-transactions for mobile games, going so far as to suggest that they will be commonplace and necessary for a game to be successful on a mobile platform.
Adding to the pool of development tips was Brent Fox, art director for XBLA game developer Ninjabee, who shared ten insights into the development process. Bungie and BioWare bigwigs also weighed in, sharing their AAA perspective on creating franchises.
Announcements
GDC day two saw a fair share of big announcements. Sony has revealed that their motion controller has an official name – the PlayStationok Move. Sony aims to sell a bundle with the Eye camera, Move controller and a game for under US$100 (±R740).
OnLive was on hand to announce a launch date for their much anticipated cloud gaming service – 17 June 2010 – which will coincide with E3 to drum up some additional attention.
Stay tuned to MyGaming to find out the winners of the IGF competitions, which are to be announced within the next few days of the event. The winners will be the next household names in indie gaming.
Thanks goes to Gamasutra – the official media partner of the event – for their cracking live coverage of the GDC and IGF. In-depth analysis of the discussions can be found at Gamasutra.
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