Summary of Edinburgh Interactive Festival (as mentioned MoMo 2nd Nov '09)

[Rach@Blonde]

To follow on from last night's discussion...

I attended EIF '09 in August with Fraser, our lead developer at
Blonde. We both thoroughly enjoyed it and the diversity of gaming
topics proved both thought-provoking and entertaining. I don't think
the 2009 festival was a sell-out, when it perhaps should have been.
Think it would definitely benefit from support within the broader
digital community. If you have any topics you'd like the festival
explore, it may be possible to contribute to an agenda by emailing
Jodie....@edinburghinteractivefestival.com.

And so, to Fraser's summary.....

"The theme of this year's conference was very much that times are
a'changing. Although the games industry is one of the few to still be
growing year on year despite the recession (it's now bigger than the
music, movies and book industries) the current climate is still very
challenging for the companies involved.

- Peter Moore (President of EA Sports) told us how EA Sports had
reinvented itself over the past two years, moving away from a brand
just for guys sitting on a couch towards a brand that was aware of the
new games playing audiences (online, social, Wii players, women!) that
were picking up and interested in sports games. With the launch of
systems like Dynamic DNA for the hardcore fans to the launch of the EA
Sports Interactive - a more active, work out style complement to Wii
Sports. They also upped their online interaction with the fans, both
with online UGC allowing players to create teams in the run up to
launch and import them into the game. Also engaging in a dialogue with
their fans through video updates and through youtube as levinator25
can attest.

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/07/nba-live-09s-dy/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ1st1Vw2kY

- Next up, Sean Dromgoole of Some Research and Crawford Christie of
Arkenford Ltd. gave us some statistics on how the games buying
population has changed over the past 6 years:

1. It's grown (from a 35 billion to 70 billion pound industry)
2. The number of gamers has increased but these new gamers tend to be
more casual.
3. In 2004 a lot of the top selling games were combat games - in 2008
it's a lot reduced.
4. The market for social games (Wii) adventure games (RPGs) and
combat
games (Call of Duty) and intellectual creative/puzzle games (Sims)
aren't all that dissimilar, though combat and social have a bigger
slice. But there's an awful lot more competition for a combat game,
adventure game and to a lesser extent social game than there is for
the creative/puzzle games.
(this was split on an axis of real world reward vs in game reward and
intellectual vs active but I've crudely compressed it here for
brevity)

- Jumping away from the traditional games industry now the next
speaker (Martin Owen, CEO of Smalti) gave a presentation on sound-only
games:

These are games where your imagination is used instead of 3d rendering
graphics. Examples were an augmented reality version of a riot in
Bristol in 1831 and an educational game using sound to turn a school
playground into the african savannah for young "lions" to hunt on.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/content/madeinbristol/2004/04/riot/riot_story.shtml

Definitely worth looking into.

- Probably the most controversial presentation (for the traditional
games developers) was next - Kristian Segerstrale, CEO of Playfish
taught us some "Lessons from Social Games". His company is responsible
for 7 games which are in the Facebook top 20 - Pet Society, Restaurant
City and others. He explained that brands aren't important in social
games (at least not yet... there's argument that will change) - none
of the top Facebook games are branded.

He then explained how social games, or at the very least games on
social networks are moving towards software as a service - no longer a
product you buy in a shop. This has some advantages - Playfish are
able to roll out game changes to 10% of their players, assess feedback
and then implement or reject the changes.

Dangers are that success can kill you - if you get too many players
and don't figure a way to make money from them (all their games are
free to play, with microtransactions allowing you to buy extra shiny
things or just a leg up on the ladder for real cash). Also that the
more people playing the more customer service you're going to need.

He also made a very good point about the type of game that succeeds on
a social network. You have to build the social interaction into the
heart of the game. An early success on Facebook was one game where you
bought and sold your friends on a virtual stockmarket. Not a lot to
it
- you bought someone, someone else bought them off of you. But if you
were to buy someone's girlfriend - suddenly their boyfriend has to
start playing the game and will pay over the odds to buy them back.
All virtual money of course but you can see how something which
correctly harnesses the social aspects spreads.

As a testament to the success of this, their most popular game (Pet
Society) regularly breaks 500,000 concurrent users, and they've only
ever marketed by word of mouth (I asked if they did anything to seed
it - their tactic was just to send the game to 100 of their friends
and see how it grows, if a game were to do badly they stop investing,
if it does well they add more features).

Moving forward he was mentioning iPhone applications using Facebook
connect to keep the social aspects - this adds both more to your
iPhone games and potentially increases the market for a social game.

- Somewhat echoing Kristian's talk was the following Panel - Osma
Ahvenlampi, CTO of Sulake Corp. (most famously known for Habbo Hotel),
Simon Seefeldt from Jagex (best known for their free to play/
subscription MMO Runescape which has had over 175 million
registrations) and Simon Guild, Chairman of Bigpoint games - the
largest games portal in Germany and in the top three world wide. The
connection being that "It's all in the browser." - all three
companies
offer browser based games.

These three discussed the routes to monetisation (Jagex and Bigpoint
offer a subscription model, with Habbo offering microtransactions to
turn real cash into virtual cash to buy items in game with) and
advertising (Jagex and Habbo use word of mouth, Simon from Bigpoint
was stressing the decline in price of TV advertising spots and
recommended slots on MTV).

- Next Mike Bennet from Oil studios gave a presentation on how to
"Grow Up and Stop Playing with Yourself!" or how interactive content/
games can be used to put across serious messages. He talked us through
the Routes game/documentary/interactive drama/alternate reality game
which was produced as a collaboration between the Wellcome trust and
Channel 4. Fascinating use of the different media available and shows
just what you can achieve when you connect everything up together.

http://oilstudios.com

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2009/feb/06/channel-4-routes-wellcome-game-serious-game-video-game-new-media-web-multimedia

- Unfairly to Ed Williams, MD of BMO Capital Markets I didn't actually
take any notes on his speech. It was, to be fair, about the funding
and investment prospects for games companies over the next few years
but it was very interesting despite that :)

- The next presentation made me think (briefly) maybe I wouldn't have
been bored to tears if I'd become a lawyer like my mother had hoped,
but I'm still glad I went for programming. It covered what would be
involved if the Government were to introduce tax breaks for games
companies in the same vein as the tax breaks for Film companies (and
why it's necessary - Canada and France have overtaken the UK in games
production almost certainly due to very generous tax breaks).

- Following this Ian Livingstone (any Games Workshop, European
Dungeons and Dragons fans or Fighting Fantasy fans should recognise
that name) chaired the Great Debate on whether the Age of the
Blockbuster Video Game is coming to an end... Some very colourful and
entertaining arguments from Peter Moore, Sean Dromgoole, Kristian
SegerStrale and Ray Maguire led to the vote going against the motion -
i.e. that Blockbuster games were here to stay.

- Some chat at the post conference free bar (thanks to the Edinburgh
Science Triangle) ended the evening.

- Friday's talks started with Robert Seaver from Vivox explaining how
integrating voice comms into MMOs does quite a lot for the groups of
people using it - be it social groups or competitive guilds striving
to get a world first for beating the latest WoW boss - as well as the
companies running the games. Groups who used voice comms on average
continued to play the game for four times as long and during this time
they played twice as much as the average in groups who only
communicated with text.

He outlined their software which allows positional voice
communications in games - e.g. having people standing in a virtual
marketplace chattering, if you turn your character's head the sound
would change position, if you walked away it would get quieter.

Also the possibility of voice fonts - the ability to alter your voice
in real time so that you can sound more like the avatar you're
playing. A deep gruff voice for a burly orc...

- This was followed by Peter Cowley (MD of Digital Media for Endemol
UK) who presented on the Evolution of TV Branded Games - starting with
the red button and online activity around the first series of Big
Brother and moving through the phenomenal (and not completely
understood) success of the Deal or No Deal mobile phone game to
interactive spectacles like the XBOX Live Premiere version of 100 to
1, where a live host interacts with people playing the game from their
XBOX at home. One lucky person gets to be the 1, another 100 to be the
100 and the rest can play along at home (in the same way you can on
the regular show via the red button).

- Next was Nate Jones from Turbine (developer of Lord of the Rings
Online) explaining how they've introduced online tools which take in
game data and distribute it out to the world in the form of
"mylotro.com" so that players can interact with the game in a more
passive way while they're at work/on the move/otherwise not in game.

- Faster than light we had the speediest talker of the day - Keiran
O'Neill, at 21 already a millionaire (I'm not jealous, honest) and CEO
and founder of Playfire. Playfire is a social network for gamers,
which hooks into the available APIs for XBOX live and those supplied
by Sony for the PS3 to allow gamers to pull their in game stats into
their profiles. Keiran's talk focused on how games developers looking
to move into the online world shouldn't focus on trying to develop
their game or a facet of their game on every platform, but should
follow Facebook and Twitter's example in setting up APIs to allow
their engaged, motivated fans to generate these things for them.

- The final two talks were from a Chinese chap from Ultimax games (I
think, shoulda taken notes) and an Indian chap who works for the UK
Trade and Industry folks, who described how the games industry was in
their countries and the various challenges to games developers looking
to expand over there. A big difference particularly in China is there
is no console industry and there is very little point in releasing
anything that doesn't have an online component (piracy is 96% or so).
So games tend to either be microtransaction based or subscription
based and to be online."