Montreal International Game Summit 2005 Impressions
The past 2 days I have been at the Montreal International Game Summit. The conference was mostly focused on developing games for the "next generation" game consoles (PlayStation 3 and XBOX 360). Thus it didn't have that much useful stuff for the indie downloadable dev that I am.There was still some good stuff there for me fortunately. All of the keynotes were pretty enjoyable. They were mostly talking about how the traditional publisher/retail game development model is breaking down. The result is cookie-cutter games ad nauseam. I also met some cool people, so that was good.
During the breaks in between session on the first day I wrote down my impressions of them. (Day 2 seemed to be packed tighter - because I didn't write anything down then, and I don't feel like it now.) So here are my day 1 notes...
Montreal Game Summit - Day 1
Today was the first day of the International Montreal Game Summit, a gathering of game developers and their ilk. The conference started last year, but I was out of town, so this is my first time.
It's not nearly as big as GDC (nor does it last as long), but it's much much bigger then the IndieGamesCon that I went to. The organizers announced that there were about 700 attendees here this year. It started off with a keynote by Warren Spector. He talked about the future of the gaming industry, whether it would hit the mainstream or fade into the margins. His general point was that the content is king, and gaming needs to expand the range of content it produces, instead of producing endless genre clones. That's a good point, but it's not exactly new. His speech was filled with some 'back in my day things were better' from an admitted old-timer (although he did not admit his age). He also mentioned the need for retail and online distribution to become one business, and lamented the fact that team sizes have grown so big for the next-generation titles (up above 100 people on a game now). I'm definitely in the minority here, in that I operate completely outside of the normal big-budget publisher funded hit games that the industry generally focuses on. As such, Spector's talk didn't really speak to me much. I think it was intended for a different audience (the one that is majority represented here). Also, I was pretty tired from getting up early for the first time in a while.
After that I went to a session talking about AI in next-generation games. It was a good non-technical talk about the subject. The speaker said that he thought the next few years would be mostly spent getting the current AI technology up and running on the next generation console systems. He also talked about various other things that AI should try and do in the future. An enjoyable talk all around.
During lunch I had some interesting conversation with people at my table. One was a VC looking around for possible things to invest in. Some guys had previously worked for ATI and Matrox and told some old stories about the early graphics card battles.
The next keynote was from Neil Young of Electronic Arts. He starting by posing the question "Can videogames make you cry?" This was followed by discussing how to progress the story and narrative in games so that people become more emotionally invested in the experience. He also talked about what makes a game a 'Hit', which he described as the combination of execution excellence, some innovation (he said 1-3 innovations, and warned about going to far in one game), and wide audience appeal. He also showed some videos of EA's work on better facial expressions in models of people. It was very cool. He was a good speaking and I liked the talk.
Then I went to a session on 2D games. At least that's what I thought it was going to be about. In a way it was, except when he said 2D he meant only hand-drawn pixel art. It was a good overview of the history and present state of pixel art, but nothing more.
I saw Clint Hawking from Ubisoft talk about game design. It was a very wacky presentation, but quite enjoyable. Not a ton of practical take away from it, but I laughed a lot.
| Posted by dustin on November 4, 2005 with category tags of Montreal games |
Written by dustin
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