April 2001

SURVIVAL OF THE FATTEST: HOW I (BARELY) MADE IT THROUGH ANOTHER GDC 
By François Dominic Laramée

Show was good. Flight was bad. Food was atrocious.

Oh, you want the long form? OK. You know I’m not one to shut up when there’s an audience within earshot. So, brace yourselves, cuz here’s my report on the 2001 Game Developers Conference.

I was a speaker this year, which means that I was invited to a truckload of special events and parties, but being me, I didn’t go to any of them. I prefer the quiet gatherings of friends I only get to see once a year. Anyway, from what I heard, whoever sponsored these big shindigs seemed to have a lot less money to throw around than last year, and it showed. So you and I didn’t miss much. That’s it for the social report; on to more practical matters.

The Audience: Attendance seemed lower than in 2000. Several factors probably contributed to this: there have been layoffs everywhere (including a high-profile bloodbath on the first day of the show), fewer publishers were at GDC discussing deals, and the conference’s ever-increasing price tag has crossed a lot of people’s breaking point. On the other hand, the crowd was a lot more diverse than usual, with sessions targeted to female developers filled to capacity, and significant numbers of Eastern Europeans, South Asians, Scandinavians and Japanese in the audience (and, sometimes, at the speakers’ podium as well).

The Expo Floor: Nothing truly revolutionary this year; Alienbrain, WildTangent and most of the commercial game engines have made significant improvements, but nothing Earth-shattering. There was some good news for indie developers, as Garagegames and RealArcade will both provide low-cost licenses to solid engines (Tribes 2’s V12 and Lith, respectively). Otherwise, there was a general aura of wariness about the floor, as companies cut back on last year’s lavish giveaways and were far less outgoing (aggressive?), on average, in their approach to visitors. Seems like a lot of folks are afraid of what Xbox could do to their businesses.

What’s that you say? You want to hear about the booth babes?

Well, I’ll only mention two things. First, ELSA may not have the most effective trade show strategy in the world (to this day, I am not clear on exactly what it is that they do), but they must spend a fortune on model searches. Second, the folks at iSmell (the company with olfactory peripherals for games; yes, they’re still around) should be more careful with their money, because the women they put in Playboy Bunny outfits seemed sufficiently decrepit to have been part of the original staff at the Playboy Clubs in the early 1960’s, and that is NOT how you attract game developers.

The Job Fair: Nowhere was the general aura of uneasiness more obvious than in the job fair pavilion. Recruiting firms occupied a good proportion of the floor, and many of the actual development companies’ booths were manned passively or not at all. Hiring efforts were lackadaisical at best; certainly, they had nothing in common with the assaults and kidnapping attempts to which I was subjected last year. Kudos to the State of Maryland, who made every effort to attract developers to their area, and who gave away about a billion of the nicest t-shirts at the show!

Last year, identifying the "theme of the show" was easy, because online distribution (specifically the episodic kind) was on everyone’s lips. This time, it was a bit different; trends had to be inferred as much from what people weren’t saying as from what they were. Therefore, what I am about to say is very much a matter of interpretation. The highlights of the show, as I saw them, were:

Very little presence from the console manufacturers. Microsoft didn’t show a single Xbox launch title, preferring to unwrap the goods at the Tokyo Game Show and E3. The only Xbox development systems on the show floor, in fact, were in middleware companies’ booths. The situation wasn’t any rosier for the competition: there were only a handful of PlayStation lectures (one of which reportedly degenerated into an insult-throwing contest) while Nintendo, who sponsored the little bags of goodies given to attendees at the registration desk, was nowhere to be found on the show floor.

There was a bad vibe about PlayStation 2. Developers were unhappy about the machine, the tools, the launch and Sony’s support. More than a few people seemed to think that the machine would be killed by Xbox and swept under a carpet by Sony within a year. While such a debacle is unlikely (Sony won’t give up the fight easily, and they are in far better fighting shape than Sega), it does look as if the pole position is definitely slipping out of Sony’s grasp for this generation of consoles.

Lots of people betting the farm on wireless games, despite WAP’s failure. And with good reason, NTT DoCoMo’s i-Mode cellular phone system of Japan having come out of nowhere to become the #2 ISP in the world in less than 2 years. The i-Mode business model certainly has a lot to inspire content providers, as entertainment services charge subscription fees of $1-$3 a month, 91% of which is pocketed by developers and publishers. (Try to find THAT sort of deal anywhere else!)

At GDC, wireless made a pretty big splash. There were more lectures about wireless development than about Xbox and PlayStation combined, and the two most interesting/impressive technical innovations on the floor (Blender’s 3D modeling tool running on a PocketPC and Synovial’s cross-platform development API for wireless games) were in that area. The most oft-quoted reports at the show claim that "the most common internet appliance of the future will be a cell phone with an IP address" and that "wireless entertainment will be a $6 billion market by 2005." Given the paltry sums required to produce a WAP or i-Mode game, it certainly seems that wireless should be the entry-level market of choice for new developers in the next few years. (Then again, wasn’t online multiplayer supposed to be even bigger than that by now? So, who knows, really?)

The number of viable gaming platforms is growing fast. A couple of years ago, there was PlayStation, Nintendo 64, and (for a few of the luckiest) PC and GameBoy. Now, it looks like Xbox, PlayStation 2, GameCube, GameBoy Advanced, PalmOS, PocketPC, cell phones, online, interactive television, even DVD players equipped with a special chipset (and who knows what else) will provide opportunities to developers who can produce games effectively, for targeted and often non-core audiences, within realistic budgets. Which is good, because breaking into one of the "big platforms" is just about impossible for a new company without a track record; if you read between the lines during the business-track events, you couldn’t help but concluding that savvy publishers are open to the idea of taking a chance on an unknown quantity for a $150,000 GBA title, in the hope of grooming them into a long-term part of their stables, but that they won’t do it for a $3,000,000 console behemoth.

Retail distribution isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it is growing. Criterion Software’s David Lau-Kee cited a report which predicts that retail game sales in North America and Europe will grow from $8.8 billion in 2000 to $14 billion in 2005. Online distribution will be introduced stealthily, for add-ons and other trinkets which won’t anger the retailers, but full-scale digital transmission of entire games won’t happen for a few more years because "you can’t wrap a download at Christmas!"

Middleware has arrived. Oddworld’s Munch’s Odyssey is developed entirely in NetImmerse; that, by itself, should be enough to prove that the quality of middleware has reached AAA levels. David Lau-Kee also said that between 250 and 300 studios worldwide use Renderware, and that about 11 PlayStation titles built upon it were released last year. For small and mid-level developers, finding good ways to customize middleware to suit their own specialties is fast becoming more cost-effective than creating a complete technological base of their own.

I concentrated on business and wireless sessions this year, so I missed a couple of the show’s highlights (Will Wright’s lecture comes to mind; everyone who sat in says it was absolutely brilliant.) I did get a kick out of Hal Barwood’s "Four of the Four Hundred", during which he talked about rules of game design, and Jay Powell’s tightly packed discussion of contracts. If these two are on the program next year, make sure to attend.

If you go to the show next year, pick a hotel that’s close to the light rail track. Service is fast, inexpensive ($1.25 for a single passage), open 24 hours a day and there is a station at the convention center itself. Much better than touring the slums of San Jose in GDC shuttle busses after waiting outside for an hour in the morning. And you can save a bundle compared with the official hotels with shuttle service, too; I snagged a very nice room for $79 a night, across the street from the train station, and I’m sure I could have done better had I worked a little at it.

Oh, and bring plenty of restaurant money. I didn’t think it would be possible for this year’s GDC lunches to surpass last year’s in the cruddiness department, but I was wrong. Somebody please tell the caterer that skin and fat should be peeled off the marinated chicken before it is packaged into sandwiches, that broken toothpicks aren’t a condiment, and that the mayo in whatever it was that passed for potato salad isn’t going to be very good once the little boxes have rotted on tables for 3 hours.

That’s about it for this year. All in all, a good and useful week, as always, and a very enjoyable one; I hope to see you there in 2002!

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