Game Developers Conference day one roundup
Game Developers Conference day two roundup
Game Developers Conference day three roundup

Highlights from day four

The 2010 GDC has drawn to a close and this means that the winners of the Independent Games Festival competition have been announced. Be sure to check out MyGaming’s article detailing the winners. The GDC also hosts its own Game Developers Choice Awards, honouring the best mainstream titles of the past year, the details of which can be found in this MyGaming article.

AAA going strong

Despite some of the negative sentiment surrounding the future of costly AAA title development, which is supposedly under threat from social, mobile and digitally distributed casual titles, there is at least one company that holds a different view. Epic Games has tremendous faith in the Unreal Engine 3, which has recently received more feature updates. Mark Rein demonstrated its versatility, running games on an iPhone and Palm Pre, as well as a PC tech demo of stereoscopic 3D.
Rein offered a prediction for the console market, saying that stereoscopic 3D gaming will be a driving force in the near future. He went on to say that the industry will spend the next few years refining the possibilities and implementation of motion controllers such as XBox 360’s Natal and PS3’s Move, with the goal of improved and affordable hardware capable of stereoscopic 3D in mind as the next justification for consumers spending money on hardware.

The online gaming frontier

Prominent developers with invaluable experience in the realm of online gaming got together for a panel discussion on the future of online gaming. Social network gaming dominated discussion once again, with Zygna’s Brian Reynolds saying that the development process has to become about what the social experiences will be, with game mechanics a secondary consideration.

Jason Holtman of Valve mentioned the launch of Steam onto the Mac OS platform as an example of the way online capability removes physical restrictions such as the retail store. In the same vein, people do not want to be a PC or Mac gamer, they simply want to be a gamer who has access to games on whichever platform.

The console war

Independent design consultant Don Daglow shared his insight into the state of the console market, saying that the real battlefield for these devices is on Wall Street, where companies are expected to grow yearly, or face a floundering stock price. Microsoft has conquered the corporate and home office, so they look to the leisure space said Daglow. Third party services such as Facebook and Twitter are becoming increasingly important in the console business. Daglow concluded by saying that developers are under great pressure to develop franchises, but must not forget why they make games in the first place.

Thanks goes to Gamasutra– the official media partner of the event – for their cracking live coverage of the GDC and IGF.