GDC Austin is in town this week over at the Convention Center. It draws 3k developers, designers, writers, and other creatives from all over. The focus this year is on connected gaming space, encompassing MMOs, virtual worlds and social networking games. This year’s event has more than 130 lectures, panels, keynotes, and round table discussions, presented by 230 speakers and a bustling expo floor with more than 80 exhibitors and sponsors. Thus far, we have had keynotes from John Smedley of Sony Online Entertainment and J. Allen Brack and Frank Pearce of Blizzard Entertainment. Tomorrow we will be hearing from Sebastien de Halleux.
One hot topic at the conference has been youth gaming. In his opening keynote, John Smedley talked about Free Realms, a kid focused MMO. While it only launched in April, it is already up to 5M users. This is largely because it is a free game that relies on micro-transactions for monetization. Three of the major challenges that John sited were that kids have 5 minute attention spans, boys and girls require very different missions, and all aspects of the game, especially the marketplace, need to be simpler than an adult MMO. One thing he mentioned that was particularly interesting was that 75% of the game’s traffic came from TV advertising.
The panel that followed Smedley’s keynote was about Reaching A New Demographic: Kids AND Their Parents. This is the demographic that Austin based FamiGo is targeting. One advantage of this demographic is that it may be easier to monetize than just kids because the parents have control of the credit card. The greatest challenge is figuring out how to make something entertaining for all ages. Jesse Schell of Schell Games was one of the folks on that panel. I caught up with him today and asked him a bit about his company and the industry.
Bonus: Here is a surprise photo that was taken of me at some point. (I am appreciative of the angle as it obscures my baldness.)
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Great video interview, nice job will.
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