Jury Still Out on 3D Gaming, Says GDC’s General Manager

There were few signs of 3D game support at GDC last week, where mobile games for smartphones and tablets took a more prominent role than console games in general. Outside of Nintendo’s support for autostereoscopic 3D on its 3DS handheld and Sony Computer Entertainment’s support for stereoscopic 3D on its PS3 in the home, third-party publishers have been very selective with their 3D efforts on those systems and for PCs.

"I've never met a person who’s jazzed about the 3D thing,” said John Warren, CEO of independent game developer Minicore Studios. He told us at GDC he knew nobody who owned a 3D TV or was interested in seeing 3D content. It’s more expensive to make games in 3D and it’s “very difficult to tell what your” return on investment would be, he said. He said “if the industry totally goes in that direction,” supporting 3D, “then I'm sure we'll hop on the bandwagon.” But Warren said he was “seeing zero evidence” of the game industry fully supporting 3D and the adoption rate of 3D products remained low.

The conference’s organizer said “a record-breaking 22,500” people attended GDC last week, up 17 percent from 2011. It also said the GDC Expo floor featured “more than 300 exhibitors and sponsors.” It didn’t say how many there were in 2011. Hotels participating in GDC housing reported selling “over 10,000 more room nights” for this year’s GDC than last year, Scavio said Friday.

Scavio attributed the larger turnout to “industry growth” in general. “There’s a boom” in the industry, and “I think the big thing this year” were smartphone and tablet games, she said. “The industry is just expanding rapidly” thanks largely to the mobile growth, she said. While mobile gaming had a large presence at GDC in 2011, she said, “last year there seemed to be this struggle, or resistance, between traditional” game supporters and supporters of “the emerging” categories of games for mobile devices and social networks. “This year, it was all gone. … There’s just a different feeling this year,” with “less antagonistic” positions among the various segments’ supporters, she said. Developers seem “more accepting” of the various categories, she said. Developers are also “taking advantage of” mobile games now “in better and more creative ways,” she said.

"I don’t feel any negative impact” on GDC from Apple once again sitting out of the conference and holding its own news briefing across the street at the same time last week, Scavio said. “All it does is bring more excitement,” she said. “Only a couple hundred people can go” to Apple’s news briefing, so few GDC attendees could also have attended that, she said. Scavio also doubted whether fewer reporters would have covered GDC if the Apple news briefing wasn’t held because reporters attending GDC had already registered long before Apple announced its news briefing, she said. Whether Apple was “intentionally” scheduling its news briefings at the same time as GDC keynotes “I can’t say,” she said. But she said “it’s smart of them to do that” if it’s intentional.

There was no main keynote from a game hardware company this year. In fact, there was no main conference keynote at all. Instead, the conference’s organizer decided to hold six track keynotes for each of GDC’s separate conference session tracks and held the first Flash Forward session to kick off GDC. There, each main conference speaker briefly gave an overview of what they planned to discuss. “We definitely want to do” a Flash Forward presentation again, but it may not be a keynote substitute next time, Scavio said.

"We've never been a super big fan of people making announcements at our event. That’s not what we're for,” Scavio said. After having the keynote at the 2011 GDC, Nintendo had a small presence last week aside from its exhibit booth, with only a session during the conference about the game Super Mario 3D Land. Nintendo is “very selective with what they're going to present, and doesn’t present anywhere else” either, she said. But she said “we love it when Nintendo comes” to GDC with their game designers.

Research In Motion had a major presence at GDC last week, including conference sessions on developing for BlackBerry devices and porting games to the BlackBerry PlayBook. The company gave five free PlayBooks to the makers of each game nominated for the Independent Games Developer and the Game Developers Choice Awards at GDC, Scavio said. RIM was “really trying to grab the attention of the developers,” like Google did 2-3 years ago at GDC with Android devices, she said. “We'll see” whether it will lure some developers to BlackBerry, she said. “It worked” for Google because developers started developing Android-based games, she said. Asked if there was room for more major mobile game players than Apple iOS and Android, she joked, “I didn’t think there was room for anyone outside of iOS” before Android started growing significantly, she said. “I don’t see why not,” she said.

Last week’s GDC was the first in about 10 years that didn’t include Game Connection, an independently-run game industry networking conference, Scavio said. As GDC “grows, our space dwindles, and we don’t really have the bandwidth and the space to provide them what they need,” she said. Game Connection also “wasn’t our event and we couldn’t control it 100 percent, and we just decided to part ways.” Plans for the first GDC Play exhibition space at GDC were developed before GDC parted ways with Game Connection, she said. Another minus of Game Connection was that it wasn’t open to GDC attendees, who had to register separately if they wanted to attend, she said. A lot of independent game developers “wanted to show their games,” and the new GDC Play, “open to all 20,000” GDC attendees, was created for them, she said. GDC Play exhibitors last week included Minicore Studios. GDC Play will also be featured in the next GDC Online conference, Oct. 9-11 in Austin, Texas, Scavio said.

Next year’s GDC will be March 25-29, 2013, again at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center. There are “no plans to leave San Francisco,” Scavio said. It’s being held later in March than usual because that’s when dates are available at Moscone, which is booked up years in advance, she said.

Game Developers Conference Notebook

Minicore Studios is hoping to make games for multiple platforms, but has no plans to make packaged games sold at retail, its executives said at GDC. Its first game, Tanks for the Memories, is being released for Android mobile devices by Thursday, said Peter Odom, creative director and lead designer. An iOS version will follow in about a month, he said. There will be a free version and a 99-cent premium version, he said. Minicore plans to “continuously” add new tanks, game levels and game play modes for the pay version, he said. Other platforms are being considered for the title, he said. Its second game, Laika Believes, will follow in about Q4 this year, he said. Minicore is “looking at” digital distribution via Xbox Live Arcade and Steam for that title, he said. The company was started about a year ago and has about five employees now, he said, telling us, it’s “definitely growing.” Minicore wants to make games for the PlayStation Network and Nintendo’s platforms, although it will likely hold off on support for the Wii and wait instead for the coming Wii U, CEO John Warren said. “I'm excited about” the Wii U, but Warren said he wasn’t sure what development for that system would be like. The developer is also eyeing the PS Vita and, further down the road, cloud computing and game streaming services, he said. But he said, “I never really want to get into the boxed stuff” because that makes little sense for a studio of Minicore’s small size.