“The Middle of the Market is Gone – A GDC 2011 Post Mortem from an Indie Developer”

 

“The Middle of the Market is Gone – A GDC 2011 Post Mortem from an Indie Developer”

By Travon Kemel Santerre, C.E.O. And Producer at TnT Gaming LLC

After a few years of Indie Game development, I finally ponied up some money and went to the Game Developers Conference, GDC, in San Francisco. So as I sit here on my plane ride home, I am going to reflect on the lessons learned that I know will be useful to other small developers. I will discuss the major themes and trends in the industry as I observed them, as well as some cool new technology that was announced at the conference. For ease of organizing my very scattered brain I will break the discussion into a few areas. 1. Themes, 2. Networking, 3. Industry Private Parties, 4. Free Stuff, 5. New Technology, 6. Closing Words. I make no apologies for the run-on sentences, bad grammar, poor spelling, and rambling that you are about to read. You are about to read a brain dump that I will not edit later. I assure you there is lots of good information in here and if you didn’t have he 3000$ of company profit to send you to GDC like I did, start taking notes now.

1. Themes:
   1. The best saying I heard all week was by an associate legal counsel at Zynga, “The Middle of the Market is Gone”. I heard this phrase monday morning and it stuck with me all week long as being the most honest and true statement about the state the gaming industry. On the top end you have the AAA retail market. The infusion of wall street money into the big companies combined with big development budgets has led to a severe tightening of new projects on the top end. I attended a great tutorial session monday that was well represented by some of the big publishers like Microsoft Games and Activision. Both the publishers and a panel of lawyers that specialize in game development deals agreed that the AAA market is more closed to outsiders than ever before. The other end of the market, however is more wide open then every before. The opportunities for small developers to make a serious impact on the industry has never been greater. This is where the small companies have an advantage. The giant companies move to slow and have to much overhead to properly execute mobile games and apps. They admitted it themselves! The bottom of the market is open and the only people that can implement business models on the low end of the stick is us! Companies like TnT Gaming and Coltran Studios. Also XBLA and PSN are shutting the doors and getting in is almost impossible, the guys at Microsoft said it themselves along with many others.
   2. Freemium and Free to Play are the future. There was endless buzz and discussion all week long about the new creative business models that Freemium and Free to Play give the industry. Some of the numbers are staggering when you realize how well some companies have figured this business model out. I also learned that Freemium is a free Mobile Game/App and Free to Play is a free PC game.
   3. Unity Stock is rising, if you haven’t tried Unity yet, get on the bandwagon because the train has left the station. There was about 5 fully featured game engine vendors at GDC with lots of floorspace at the Expo to showcase their engines. All of them were empty but the Unity one, that combined with Unity throwing one of the best after hours party of the week. These guys have it figured out. I saw Unity do things this week that blew my mind, so google Unity and start messing with it. Happily we already have a few Unity Pro licenses and are purchasing an asset server soon so I am a super fan. Develop in one shared project, and deploy your game to PC, MAC, iPhone, Android, Xbox 360, PS3, all from one project!!!!! Absolutely nuts and cheaper then the other powerful middleware engines out there.
   4. Digital distribution is only gonna get bigger. You don’t have to attend GDC to know this, but there are more and more ways for Indie developers to distribute then ever.
   5. Stop Making Tech Demos!!!!! I met a half dozen Indie Studio Owners with teams about the same size as ours and all of them had the same story. They borrowed money, made a sexy tech demo, and no one wants to publish it. For the cost of one sexy tech demo, you can develop a dozen small apps and games. Use the revenue from that to stop putting your company in debt, and prove that you can make something that customers want to buy. A guy from GameForge said it best, “If you and your team know how to make a game that people want to play, the only problem you have is scalability.” So I say focus on creating a team that can create games people wanna play and not trying to win the lottery with a tech demo. You have a better chance of winning the lottery then getting your tech demo green lighted if you have a team where everyone has no published titles under their belt.
2. Networking
   1. Bring 250+ Business cards. I don’t care if you are a student, bring them anyways with your name on it and a little about yourself. Like “John Doe, Freelance Artist” or “Jane Doe, Game Programmer”. Spread those cards around.
   2. Update your website before you go! Halfway through the week I realized I hadn’t updated www.tntgaming.net in awhile and I just sent people to a source of out of date information.
   3. Walk up to people and say “So what brings you to GDC”, it worked great for me and started dozens of great conversations.
   4. Don’t come to GDC to sit around, and if you are tired of walking look for someone that has an open seat near them and start talking! I met so many people at GDC this way. It was kinda like being at a bar where its cool to hit on guys to. Talk to everyone! Young, old, guy, girl, just keep talking till you find the people you came to look for. Technology and fancy game engine’s are great, but one thing I have learned is that life is about people and personal relationships. I truly believe that a great game development team is about the people and not the tools. I met some amazing people because I am a social butterfly and a blabber mouth that loves talking. GDC is filled with people just like you, that are passionate about making games that people want to play, so go out there and find them.
3. Industry Private Parties
   1. This is a part of GDC I didn’t realize existed till day 2 and I wish I had known about it earlier. I was lucky enough to get invited to the Riot Games private party on Wednesday night and it was the highlight of my week. If you think its easy to meet people and network and talk to people on the Expo floor, its even easier when everyone is drinking!
   2. I also found a facebook group that was dedicated to GDC parties http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/home.php?sk=group_121851664552421&ap=1

      is a good place to start.

   3. Next year I hope I can figure out where all the Indie Game parties are at.
4. Free Stuff
   1. My Take at GDC, 1. Samsung Nexus S Android Smartphone (~550$), 2. Exxo PC Meego Tablet (~800$), 3. Starcraft 2 (~50$)
   2. If you are there monday and tuesday then sign up for anything that Google is doing. I landed my New Android phone at a google talk and was only mad that I missed the google talk monday where everyone got a free xoom tablet.
   3. Look for companies with new technology. I got my Meego Tablet because Intel is pushing this new technology hardcore and wanted to hand out hardware to 500 developers so people would start making applications for it.
   4. Get a bag to carry your shwag so you don’t look like a fool carrying around buttons and keychains.
5. New Technology
   1. Neurosky announced a new brain wave monitoring device at GDC on wendesday that only costs 99$. They had them at GDC for 80$ so I had to buy one! The website is here www.neurosky.com and it is the coolest thing I have seen in years. They operate an appstore with an 80/20 split that at the time of GDC has like 20 or so apps/games. It is so far out and cool that I can’t do it justice in this blog here. If you are interested check the link. I will say that I started coding with it yesterday and the API supports PC, MAC, Flash, Unity, Android, iPhone, XNA, Consoles, and anything else you can think of.
6. Closing Words
   1. On tuesday there was an indie talk that some of you may have attended that was called “Rapid Fire Indies”. It was 10 talks that were 5 minute presentations about various topics relevant to Indie Developers. At the end of the presentations one of the speakers got up and started rambling to fill time. Keep in mind there were about 500+ people in this room. The Speaker pulled out his cell phone and called his friend and said “hey man I am at the IGF on stage get over here now so we can do the independence day speech.” Seconds later another guy comes running in the room and up to the stage. The two of them proceed to give a comedic rendition of the speech from the movie “Independence Day.” For those that don’t remember it was a late 90s movie with Will Smith in it about aliens taking over the world, anyways. At first the speech was funny and people were laughing and enjoying it because they were trading lines back and forth and it was entertaining. But as they went further into the speech, it went from laughter to silence, and I reflected on the parallels of that speech with the current state of Indie Game development. I imagined that everyone in that room thought as I did. And when the two speakers let out those final words “Cause today is our Independence Day!” The room errupted with cheers, claps, and a standing ovation. This was the only thing at GDC that moved me to my core, because now is our time, the time of the Indie Developer. The Middle of the Market is gone people, lets seize this moment and remind the many video game players out there that Gameplay > Graphics and put these big publishers on notice!