Archive notice: This article was originally published on August 18, 2005. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
For two years, the “Developer Conference” has been part of the supporting programme of the Leipzig trade fair “Games Convention” (August 17 to 21) and has grown considerably in the process. At times five parallel panels took place, and they were often so well attended that some interested people had to remain outside the door.
The organisers had not skimped in selecting the speakers: Among the guests on the programme were some of the best-known names in the young industry: Bill Roper, who was responsible for the Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo series at Blizzard Entertainment, Peter Molyneux of Lionhead with his unusual game concepts and Don Daglow, CEO of Stormfront Studios.
#molyneux
The weightiest topic that occupied participants and speakers at the event was the next generation of games consoles, also gladly abbreviated to “Next Gen”, after the three major hardware manufacturers, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, had announced the introduction of extremely powerful new consoles in the spring. Similar to the introduction of HDTV in the broadcasting sector, however, the new device generation requires enormously high capital investment on the part of producers in order to develop appropriate content.
Julian Eggebrecht, for example, who is working with his company Factor 5 on projects for Sony’s Playstation 3, assumes production costs of around 20 million dollars for first-class titles and considers development profitable only if several titles are produced in parallel. The “high-poly” dragon models from his current project “Lair” certainly looked like their price class as well.
Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are still an important topic. Blizzard’s huge success with “World of Warcraft” (WoW) has aroused desires for a lucrative market, while WoW has meanwhile become the benchmark against which competitors must also measure themselves. Matt Firor of Mythic Entertainment summed it up as follows: “In the future, WoW will have been the ‘first time’ for many MMOG players.”
Finally, participants also discussed the prospects of mobile telephones as a platform for Multiplayer Mobile Games. Nokia in particular, with its N-Gage series, is betting heavily on this market and also sees high potential for online games. Beforehand, however, some tricky technical problems still have to be solved: What happens, for example, if the player enters a radio dead zone, and how can the enormous data transfer costs for players be reduced?
Hendrik Heimer presented the technology of his Navus GmbH as a solution. Under the tasteful name “Killing Fields”, the company has implemented a respectable test game that cleverly solves most problems.
The concept of interlinking the developer conference and trade fair has obviously worked. Among the conference visitors were also numerous foreign guests, who said in conversation that the trip had been worthwhile for them because of the combination of the two events.
Further Links:
- GC Developer Conference
