GDC Day 4

The most popular way to get attendees to visit a booth at GDC.

Today was a day for the Expo... in between meetings and random encounters. And missing some of the people I was hoping to find... but they'll turn up sooner or later. The Expo was an intense experience, with crowds of people, brightly colored booths with billions of polygons and technology oozing from every port. Here's some impressions of what I saw today:

The Nintendo 3DS. I finally got a chance to play with a 3DS and see some of the titles coming up for it. A very nice 3D effect without glasses... as long as you keep your eyes in the sweet spot. The movie clip produced a good 3D effect. I tried a couple of the built-in Augmented Reality (AR) games, which used the 3DS cameras to view a card on the desktop to create a dragon that you could shoot at by moving the 3DS around and pressing the button. Another game took a picture of your face and mapped it onto targets... rather disturbing I think.

Overall, the 3DS felt heavier than a DSi, and the controls seemed sturdy. The 3D effect worked well, but after playing for 15 minutes I found I had a headache. I think it's a nice device, but I am still unconvinced that the market will embrace the device the way it embraced the DS. There are some significant limitations, such as the battery life (3-5 hours versus 15 or more), the $250 price tag, the high cost of the games ($40 or more) and the still-feeble embrace of digital distribution and its possibilities. In a market where smartphones will be selling in the hundreds of millions, the 3DS will  be lucky to achieve a significant fraction of their market share.

What could Nintendo do better? I'd say bring down the price to $199, and embrace digital distribution for a wide range of price points. Open it up to developers and a wide variety of apps. I's screens would still be far lower resolution than a smartphone, but at least it wouldn't have such a glaring disadvantage in software distribution.

The Sony Xperia Play. In stark contrast to the 3DS is the new "Playstation Phone" from Sony Ericsson. I had seen pictures, and it looked pretty cool... but holding it you're struck by how incredibly thin and light it is. And speedy... with a gorgeous screen. Android powered, and a set of Playstation games included, with more on the way. Makes the 3DS look clunky and underpowered and kinda ugly. Frankly, I'm not enamored of 3D. Nintendo's tried to make it important as a gameplay element, but it's unclear how many games will really do that. And the headaches may be more prevalent than Nintendo would like. The Xperia Play is a worthy phone to carry, and a great gaming device.

Middleware, Payments, Cloud Computing... All of these had multiple booths for a variety of vendors. I took a variety of literature, but really reporting on these things will require some review. There seems to be more ways than ever to get paid for your games, and to have your games hosted, and to have various sorts of services connected to your games. The part that I really don't understand is booths seemingly devoted to obscure Chinese MMOs. Other other foreing games... why have a booth at GDC? What do they hope to gain? I'll try to find out tomorrow, because I'm curious.

One interesting note: The most popular prize for giveaways at booths seems to be an iPad... with a few bold booths offering an iPad 2. Of course, they're only giving away one to a booth... but there are a half dozen booths where you can find this offer. Interesting that they would presume attendees at GDC to be interested in this item... and I think they're right.

Right now I want to spend some time watching the League of Legends tournament being staged for the GDC Conference Associates... my son is competing. More tomorrow.

GDC Day 3

It's been a long day, as tens of thousands of attendees descend on the Moscone Center. Some interesting data from today's sessions...

Digital Overtakes Analog Distribution. It's happening fast, and sometime this year or next digital distribution of games will amount to more than all the games sold in retail stores. Unfortunately, not all of the old-line publishers seem to have gotten the memo. As Colin Sebastian from Lazard Capital Markets admitted to me, some executives say they understand... but that isn't the way they're spending their money. Hey, well, more business for the rest of us who can see what's happening and don't have the legacy structures to unravel.

Nintendo Still Doesn't Get It. Sad to say, Iwata-san is still complaining about how those cheap games on smartphones devalue real games, and not actually doing anything about it. I think Nintendo's strategy is basically to hope their business recovers because all of those mobile and social games are just a bad dream and someday everyone will wake up and go back to paying $40 for every game. The whole mobile/social explosion is hitting Nintendo especially hard, as they've always been more focussed on less intense gamers. Nintendo announced a few things... a deal with Netflix for streaming movies on the 3DS, free WiFi through AT&T... but nothing that fundamentally changes the market picture for them. Reality: Nintendo may sell 10 or 20 million 3DS units this year... while Apple and Google sell 200 million smartphones or more. And perhaps 100 million tablets on top of that. And then there's Apple TV and Google TV...

Apple TV and Google TV Hit This Year. Colin Sebastian, for one, agrees with me that this is the year Apps hit TV sets, and the impact will be similar to one about 65 million years ago. Similarly, a number of dinosaurs will perish, unable to adapt to the new environment. You think Nintendo's having trouble now, where's the Wii gonna fit in when you can get thousands of games for free on your TV?

The Expo Is... Crowded. All I had time for today was a fast stroll just to take in the atmosphere... which was mostly focussed around the Career Pavilion, but still big crowds everywhere. The basic company booth was MXLPTK, the unpronounceable futuristic name that produces high CPM shaded polygons with a mobile payment system that automatically captures your motions with optimized code. Or something like that, I think. Perhaps I have one or two companies mooshed together. It's been a long day.

Ebook Sales: Numbers That Will Make Your Eyes Pop

I've been writing about how the whole ebook market has undergone massive acceleration in the past year, and if you want some hard data, look no further than this post. Amanda Hocking, a 26 year old writer who has never had a traditionally published novel, is selling excess of 100,000 ebooks a month. In January, she sold 450,000 ebooks. OK, yeah, they were only $3 apiece, and she only gets 70% of that... even if you can't do the math in your head you can tell it's a pretty good sum ( yeah, almost a million dollars in January... what will she do the rest of the year?).

Here's what one publisher said: "There's no publisher in the world who can offer her better terms than she's getting on the Kindle store all on her own."

OK, maybe if you've got an offer on the table for a $200,000 advance for your novel, maybe you should take it. And maybe not... and if you're sitting on a novel that's been making the rounds for months or years, why the hell aren't you putting it on the ebook market and making some money right now?

The ebook revolution is just getting started... we have just seen the beginning.

I know I'm getting my novels moving... no need to worry about a publisher, I just need to write some novels and make sure they're good. (Not an easy task by any means... but when I have those it's just a few short steps to market).

GDC Day 2

The second day of the GDC is really the day before the real conference... right now there are only 3 or 4 thousand attendees, and tomorrow the number will be closer to 20,000. The first two days are summits and tutorials, with "summits" being mini-conferences on such topics as AI, Education, Social & Online, Smartphone, Independent Games, Serious Games and Localization. It's kind of odd that the fastest growing market segments (smartphone and social games) are relegated to a smaller footprint, but I guess it would just be overwhelming to include those specific topics in the myriad other tracks competing for attention during the next three days.

I attended an interesting session on emerging technologies today, which was discussing the ways being created to bring higher-powered gaming to browsers. Adobe's Molehill project will give developers access to the GPU for accelerating 3D performance with a browser... speeding up things by an order of magnitude or two (check out the videos on that link). Facebook has been working on seeing just how fast they can get Facebook games to perform, with some impressive results. And Mozilla has been working on a version of OpenGL called WebGL, hoping they can provide a universal solution to fast browser performance for games.

I'm not sure what technology will wint out here, but it's clear that browser game performance on desktops, tablets, and smartphones is going to take a big leap forward in the next year. Which is good news for game developers looking to bring some more graphic buzz to their games that can work on a very wide array of devices.

Most of the day, though, was spent renewing old contacts and having new discussions. Lunch with Warren Spector was fun, as was chatting with Eric Goldberg about old times in the game business. There will be a lot fo things to follow up on after the show...as is usually the case.

One thing I have learned, though, is to make sure next year to be there for Google's first seminars... attendees were given laptops running ChromeOS, Motorola Xoom tablets or Nexus S smartphones... wow. Nothing like encouraging developers to attend your seminars!

BREAKING: Panasonic's "The Jungle" Clearcut

The handheld that will never be.

Shocking news announced today: Panasonic has cancelled its hugely anticipated handheld MMO gaming device, "The Jungle." Yes, it's hard to believe given the overwhelming worldwide interest in Panasonic's offering, which I detailed in this post. OK, I did call it "The Fiasco", which turns out to be prescient. Amazing... what a stunning prediction. I mean, if you compare the stats of The Jungle to the 3DS and the NGP... wait, Panasonic never did announce any stats, did they? Or a price, or a launch date, or any reason at all to be enthusiastic.

At least it's a great lesson on how not to announce a product. Or develop one. I sure hope someone at Panasonic lost their job over this massive waste of company resources on a project that anyone with even a passing familiarity with the game market could have told them was a bad idea.

Well, Nintendo and Sony can breathe a little easier now that The Jungle isn't a threat.

Android In-App Payments Launch Set

Where you will find in-app payments for Android.

Finally, Google is set to launch in-app payments for Android. About frickin' time, say developers who have seen all the money coming to iOS products even though Android phones are selling better. Yeah, there are solutions from PayPal and others, but there's nothing like having something baked right into the system.

The launch looks to occur in May, probably rolled out in a big way at Google's developers conference (Google I/O) which is scheduled for May 10-11.

Games will be leading the charge at taking advantage of this, of course. Given that in-app payments make up more than half the revenue for Apple's iPhones, it stands to reason it should do reasonably well on Android. Maybe Android revenues will begin to amount to more than 1/20 of iOS revenues... can we go for 1/10?

Angry Birds Not the Only Ones Angry

Portrait of a physics engine creator?

I wasn't there, but TechCrunch reports an awkward moment at a GDC talk yesterday. While Rovio's CEO Peter Vesterbacka was giving a talk about Angry Birds, a guy stood up during the Q&A session and asked for credit in the game for his physics engine. Seems that Erin Catto did indeed create the engine Rovio used, and while by his own terms they didn't need to credit him (foolish terms, if you ask me), he is miffed they didn't.

Sounds like Rovio will be talking to him about this... they should at least give him some credit, if not a little financial appreciation given the level of success Angry Birds has achieved.