.:Out-of-the-box:.

Yesterday I had a session on one of Polish Colleges. I met about 100 students and spoke about Trends in Games Industry. Very broad and very interesting topic. If we say trends in gaming, many people think on the next game they would like to buy and play. On my speech, that was not the case. I tried to explain young people who may dream of game creation, how to think on next games they would like to make. Games not only they would like to play after creation, but those which can help them become commercially successful and find millions of fans around the world. If you look at it from this perspective, very important issue reveals itself, and that was the reason why I spoke about trends. I call this issue by the name, huge aspirations of young creators for their first projects.

Many young and especially programmers I've spoken to, take following direction. They meet with other talented guys and say: We have talent, we have skills so let's make the best of the best game like none before have even existed. And then they agree to pick up a very complicated idea of a game which by the name is huge and resource consuming project, like role-playing game for example. I'm glad that market matured to give them alternatives. I'm glad that we have already on the market good examples of much smaller and still innovative projects can be done within months by one to few people devoted to the subject. I made that comparison between huge and small projects on different platforms especially when I spoke about technological changes and trends for the future in technology. Innovation in games is always strongly connected to game design.

Good design of a game I understand in good game-play features and experience. Job well or not so well done in that area may, in my opinion, push a project very easily into a crap category instead of super-cool. Much easier than if game's technology itself is outstanding or not. Joint point between these two is technology in design and that is another extremely important subject I was talking about. Last part of my speech was about different business models in games industry. I spoke both about those which are already stable and evolving. I mentioned also those which still look kind of abstract (like AAA games offer in Cable TV network or idea of re-used games market in the world of digital distribution mentioned in last Edge (December's paper edition).

Whole that content was positioned to be valuable for junior/wanna be game creator with big aspirations but maybe yet not so experienced in the combat. Message was articulated rather for designers, producers and game project managing persons than developers (programmers) themselves. Mind it while reading below details about my thoughts in subject:

Technology | Design | Business Models