GDC 2010 Coverage

Tuesday, March 9

19:55 PST / 03:55 (March 10) GMT (Oli - Eurogamer): Activision has spent the first couple of days of GDC showing off its "reboot" of also-ran open-world action series, True Crime, in a suite at the W. To read about the game in detail, check out Ellie's preview over on Eurogamer.net.

This time, development's being handled by young Vancouver studio United Front, also making the intriguing UGC-focused kart racer ModNation Racers for Sony. United Front told us it had staffed up for the True Crime project by employing local developers from Rockstar, EA Black Box and Radical Entertainment, the specialist in open-world action games (Prototype, Scarface, the Incredible Hulk) which recently suffered harsh staff cutbacks at the hands of its owner... Activision.

What goes around comes around, I guess.

19:47 PST / 03:47 (March 10) GMT (Phil): EA Sports is hosting a party tonight at the Yerba Buena Press Club, a basement wine bar next to the Moscone, and to kick off proceedings were a set of presentations based around the Madden, NCAA, MMA and EA Sports Active franchises. A couple of interesting things stood out in particular:

Firstly, they capture an obscene amount of data from NCAA and Madden games that are played on connected consoles - about 173 million pieces of data per day - and that's helping the teams shape the next iterations in the franchises. Specifically they know that 82 per cent of NCAA and 76 per cent of Madden players are connected to the internet across Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 - pretty strong numbers.

But more interestingly, they're using captured in-game data to check whether the mass gamers are experiencing what they were intended to - the success rate of a certain type of tackle, for example, can be identified and the game then tweaked in a live update if the stats aren't hitting the ratios that were originally intended.

It reminds me a lot of a talk at DICE by Brian Reynolds (Zynga) who explained the company's approach to iterative game design - namely 'data-driven' game design, where they look at the actions of users within the game and use that data to evolve the experience. Fascinating stuff.

18:25 PST / 02:25 (March 10) GMT (Oli - Eurogamer): The lobby and bar of the W hotel in San Francisco have been humming with informal meetings all afternoon. Nothing new about that - it's as much a GDC tradition as the parties (usually hosted by Nordic Game) that would be unforgettable if they weren't so hard to remember. But today, casual eavesdroppers found their ears assaulted by two words, or rather brands, over and over agin: Facebook and iPad.

With the social and mobile gaming tracks dominating today's schedule, maybe that shouldn't come as a surprise. But there's a definite sense that our industry is changing. You didn't need to look any further for evidence of that than this afternoon session by Zynga, the developers of social gaming sensation FarmVille. It was standing room only in one of the Moscone's largest lecture theatres as hundreds of developers crammed in to find out how one of the world's most popular and profitable games - 31 million players per day, 110 million installs - was made by six developers in five weeks. Looking at those figures, it's not hard to understand why.

Spotted in the audience: CCP's house economist, Dr Eyjolfur Gudmundsson. Are the makers of the internet's most ambitious and ruthless virtual world, EVE Online, flirting with the social space? Now that's a scary thought.

16:13 PST / 00:13 (March 10) GMT (Kath): In a panel entitled Investing In New Game Companies, venture capitalists and analysts discussed the changing values of the industry, highlighting the pros and cons of the rise in social gaming.

While admitting he is a core gamer himself, Tim Chang of Norwest Venture Partners said he's not investing in them. They "suck as customers" he said, pointing out they're hard to please and prone to pirating their games. Customers that don't care about pixel numbers are easier to please, he said, and the market they populate is growing.

He said that the future would see a rise in premium social games, encompassing longer sessions as the format evolves. Developers should go back to the games they were making before they had a lot of polygons, then wrap them with free-to-play and micro-transactions, he added.

The challenge will be managing the cost of customer acquisition, said Mark Jung, chairman Epic Advertising. Kids are learning about games on the iPhone, he said, not the DS or Xbox 360. And the amount of disposable time people have will never change – every minute they choose to spend it playing phone games is one they don't spend on Xbox Live. It's a problem for the industry, he said, which will prevent it from growing.

16:08 PST / 00:08 (March 10) GMT (Phil): Just announced - Bigpoint is putting together a browser-based game based on Battlestar Galactica. The news was just press released, and details are still scant, but the company's CTO Jan Wergin told me earlier that more information will spill out in the next month, while the game is tentatively set for release later this year.

As with Uniter, the iPod/PC cross-platform game announced yesterday (working title), Battlestar Galactica will use the Unity 3.0 engine. I only saw a splash screen, so no sense of the in-game visuals, but it's a big license for the part-NBC owned company to be working on.

15:23 PST / 23:23 GMT (Phil): If you're interested in what's hot in the Japanese mobile gaming scene, there are some interesting parallels between that and the social games sector in the West, according to Pikkle's David Collier, in a session entitled "Social Games in Japan". The top five titles are:

• Sunshine Ranch - a farming game (think Farmville)
• Friends Scorecard - a survey game
• City Sim - a city-building title (think SimCity)
• Kaitou Royale - a Mafia game (think Mafia Wars)
• Kaiji Test - a quiz game (think Buzz!)

The games themselves are played by millions of mobile users with similar themes and functionality to popular Facebook titles. There's no obvious parallel to the survey game, but the rest have very clear counterparts - and Kaitou Royale alone makes around $7 million per month... even the iPhone market isn't quite at that level yet...

12:54 PST / 20:54 GMT (Kath): Just finished interviewing Alex St John, president of Hi5 – founder of WildTangent and one of the creators of Microsoft's DirectX. He has a lot of opinions – unsurprisingly most relate to Hi5's successful rival platform Facebook, but he's also got a lot to say about the likely next moves of Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.

He's said it before and he still more than stands by it – this generation of consoles will be the last. The reason the three platform holders haven't made an announcement on their next consoles is because they're waiting to see what happens in the online gaming space. Better 3D graphics won't cut it any more – there's diminishing return for better graphics - as proven by the most successful console of this generation, the Wii, which is defined by its control system rather than its visuals.

Microsoft and Sony are trying to get their technologies into living rooms, he says, but the concept of a living room is no longer relevant. People have computers in their bedrooms, they play games on their laptops. It doesn't matter how big the screen is, he points out – if you're sitting two feet away from a laptop screen it's as good as playing on a massive TV. Look at what's happened to arcades, he says. Now they only feature games you can't get at home – with complex cabinets. Compare that to what's happening with the home consoles – Natal, Rock Band. Even if the consoles don't go away, they're fast going to become as irrelevant as the arcade business, he adds.

Oh, and he's yet another doubter of OnLive - "They're out of their damn minds. It's too bad because it's the right notion and the wrong execution. I know it can't be done – I've been building these technologies a long time – it doesn't work, it can't be done," he says. The presenters of Wednesday's session 'It's OnLive! Cloud-based gaming Is Here' (PST 1:45) could be in for a tricky Q&A session.

12:36 PST / 20:36 GMT (Phil): More doubts have just been cast over the viability of the OnLive remote gaming plans, this time from the perspective of a global internet service provider. Vlad Ihora, head of games at TeliaSonera - the company that handles the networking for Blizzard Europe and Ankama, among others - has suggested that the kind of results that are being touted aren't impossible... but aren't likely just yet.

"Obviously remote gaming is a very important part of the future," he told me earlier. "Unfortunately it's not necessarily a strong part of the present as yet. It's not anything to do with OnLive or other such companies, in terms of their algorithms or service in itself - it has a lot to do with the rest of the components in the value chain."

He went on to point out the latency that will hit the performance at several points of the network, and suggested that a solid operation could still be as much as a year away in somewhere like South Korea, and more like 18 months in the US and Western Europe. We'll have more from Vlad when we publish the full interview in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, OnLive is set to spill more details later this week, while we'll be talking to Gaikai's David Perry about how that particular service is shaping up too.

10:15 PST / 18:15 GMT (Kath): Ron Carmel from 2D Boy has been explaining the new Indie Fund revealed recently in a session entitled Indie and Publishers: Fixing a System That Never Worked. With the range of distribution channels now available to developers, Carmel said that developers no longer need publishers for their games, or the bad terms that can often come with them. But they do need funding, which is where the Indie Fund comes in.

Carmel listed a number of key ways the Fund aims to work. Its submission process will be transparent and terms publicly available, while developers will be allocated a single point of contact and have flexible development terms. The Indie Fund will create a whole new model where developers submit periodic builds to the Fund, with the game evaluated based on how it's progressed since the last submission, not judged on a game design document drawn up a year ago.

Finally, the Fund will have no control or ownership of the IP of the game its funding. They wouldn't fund it if they didn't believe the team was able to deliver, said Carmel. It's easy for publishers to believe they know better, but they often don't. The size of the fund wasn't revealed, but if the team sees 20 games in a year it wants to fund, it will raise the money. His talk and the idea behind the fund was positively received by the audience, many of whom clearly welcomed this alternative to traditional funding routes.

02:46 PST / 10:46 GMT (Matt): Animation studio Image Metrics has launched its new facial animation technology, Faceware, with Halo developer Bungie the first to publicly sign up for the software.

"Creating realistic facial animation is a critical component to bringing believable, character-driven performances to life for our next studio project," said Marcus Lehto, creative director at Bungie. "Faceware lets us raise our extremely high quality bar and maintain the ultra fast turnaround times and animator efficiency we need without impacting our existing pipeline.”

As well as games like Assassin's Creed II and Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, Faceware has also been used in the Black Eyed Peas' Boom Boom Pow music video and commercials for Rock Band 2 and Fox's Biscuits.

02:02 PST / 10:02 GMT (Matt): The Game Developers Conference may be getting back to basics this year, with a focus on the development community rather than publishers and hardware manufacturers, but that hasn't stopped the rumours and gossip of expected 'big news'. Yesterday, games blog VG247 ran a piece rumouring that Sony would announce solid information on its motion control peripheral, and a possible reveal of LittleBigPlanet 2. But so far, nothing.

I like rumour and speculation as much as the next site, but I think those recent reports are running on out of date intel. I've heard that any motion control details will come to light on Wednesday (early Thursday in the UK), when Sony holds a press event in San Francisco (and we'll have staff on the ground to report from it).

As for LittleBigPlanet 2? It wouldn't be surprising to hear of LBP content that supported Arc/Gem or whatever Sony's motion control is going to be called, but any announcement of a direct sequel is likely to be held off until E3. And that's assuming a 'proper' sequel would happen at all rather than Sony and Media Molecule continuing to support the game with direct digital downloads. Or at least that's what I'm speculating. That's the trouble with rumours and gossip...

Monday, March 8

18:15 PST / 02:15 (Mar 9) GMT (Phil): Meanwhile, some news from a little bit earlier - Unity Technologies has announced that it's released a new version of the Unity Engine (version 3.0) which adds in support for the iPad, Android and PlayStation 3, giving it the "broadest support on the market," according to a statement.

"Since our first version in 2005, Unity Technologies has been focused on the democratisation of interactive 3D and delivering an impressive list of technological advances making it the technology of choice for more than 100,000 developers today," said David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies. "We have been driven by innovation and a desire to always offer the best capabilities to developers. Unity 3.0 is built on that same promise and allows our customers to further expand the reach of their games to new platforms and audiences."

Also today, Bigpoint and Unity hooked up to showcase a game called Uniter, which allows iPhone and PC gamers to race against each other. "This is an important and historic opportunity for the online gaming industry," said BigPoint CEO Heiko Hurbertz. "We believe the future of gaming exists in a world without borders and platform boundaries and in real-time. Bigpoint is excited to show the industry how it will unify the gameplay experience for gamers across all the devices they use to play our games."

I'll be speaking to Heiko tomorrow, while Kath is set to chat to David on Thursday - so expect more on casual games and broad-support engines then!

18:04 PST / 02:04 (Mar 9) GMT (Phil): The conference proper starts tomorrow (although Game Connection America has been in full flow today), and Kath and I will be taking in a number of sessions, including:

• Indies & Publishers, with Ron Carmel (2D Boy)
• From Big Studio to Small Indie, with Sean Murray (Hello Games)
• Why Are Veterans Flocking to Social Media?, with (among others) Brian Reynolds (Zynga) and Noah Falstein (Inspiracy)
• Investing in New Game Companies, with (among others) Evan Wilson (Pacific Crest)
• Social Games in Japan, with David Collier (Pikkle KK)
• Succeeding With Licensed Brands, with (among others) N'Gai Croal (Hit Detection)

Of course, anybody that's been to GDC before will know that schedules are somewhat flexible, but that's the plan at the moment, so hopefully we'll bring updates to you throughout the day as the magic happens.

17:43 PST / 01:43 (Mar 9) GMT (Phil): Hi all and welcome to the coverage of GDC 2010. Over the next few days we're going to be bringing as much of the flavour and colour of this year's show to you in a slightly different format - rather than trying to shoehorn session coverage into more formal news stories and post-event interview features, we'll be posting to this blog-style feature as regularly as internet connection allows, with snippets of interesting stuff from sessions, parties, queues, and anything else we think is noteworthy.

Hopefully it'll be a bit more fluid - and give more of a sense of occasion - than most show coverage manages to do.