Ustream.tv has video of all the conference panels(even the one I moderated on managing a virtual economy). Check it out and see what you missed.
Having said that, the real value of a conference is meeting the people in your industry. You can't that on video.
Since I didn't take notes, here are some of the things still rattling around my brain days later:
Channels Panel: Zynga and SGN suggested that they might be working on linking their networks. The basic idea is that they would sell clicks to companies wanting to get their properties in front of the gaming audience and the network that served the game link that was clicked through would get the credit. I know both these companies have greater ambitions than to be ad, *cough*, I mean, game networks, and this detente suggests that they may be differentiating toward different aspects of social gaming. Or not. :)
Platforms Panel: Jessica Alter of Bebo indicated that AOL Instant Messenger would be integrated directly into the Bebo platform. The AOL-Bebo acquisition just closed, but Jessica indicated that this was an immediate priority for the AOL-Bebo team. Despite my general bearishness on real-time games in the near future, I think Bebo may soon offer the best opportunity for real-time games. One immediate beneficiary should by the team leading the QQ Games US division, who already have a close relationship with AOL and would benefit immensely from the social network traffic (that is if people can get over having to download the QQ client).
VC Panel: Jeremy Liew, Lightspeed Venture Partners believes that there is an opportunity for a social games publisher to emerge much in the way that EA did back at the birth of computer games. His thesis rests on the presupposition that a publisher can create/acquire a succession of hit games. It's a risky proposition (especially for a VC) considering that so far, no publisher has seen more than 1-2 hit games in their portfolio, despite hundreds of games being launched on Facebook. Meanwhile, Naval Ravikant, Hitforge felt that Facebook was no place for venture-backed companies, since the revenue wasn't there yet, but it was great for lifestyle businesses. Accel's Ping Li is looking at gaming infrastructure plays, which strikes me as the typical venture approach, i.e. avoiding content risk and focusing on platform plays.
Advertising Panel: Sadly, I missed most of it due to , but there was an indication that branded virtual items were already becoming a big source of revenue.
Virtual Economy Panel: I heard the moderator was amazing, some guy name Bret. Extremely handsome and wow, was he funny. Okay, it was me, I was the moderator. The panel agreed that if you don't THROUGHLY think through your economy before you launch your game, you will be screwed. Siqi Chen, CEO of Serious Business indicated that he believes the slowing growth of Friends For Sale is due to inflation - simply put, it's becoming too expensive for newer players to buy anyone. I think it's a very reasonable assumption, and shows how important economy is to the overall health of a game. Fraud was also a huge issue for all the panelists, Siqi revealed that 3 of his 12 employees did nothing but handle fraud issues. That's 25% of the headcount for all you kids out there making your business plans.
Siqi also made the claim that just being on a panel with him would get us laid. I'm not going to say whether it's true or not, you'll have to judge by the title of this Facebook group.
Developer Analytics and Playfish both offered excellent presentations which I will link to once they get them posted. And I'll possibly comment on them.
Normally, I hate writing soft posts, you know those posts where the author talks about how much they love risotto, when all I really care about is their analysis of the social games industry. That is why you all subscribe to my blog, after all.
Well, there'll be no analysis today, nor talk about the finer aspects of risotto (I know you're disappointed). This is just a love letter to the social games industry.
If you give it a moment of thought, to spend your adult life creating games seems pretty trivial when compared to say curing cancer. It probably is. But it's a helluva lot more fun. Oncologists may feel free to disagree.
But honestly, would you really want to live in a world without games? I know people who never play games. I don't like them. They're boring. Their imagination has been drained. They're afraid to say fuck at work. You can often find them in the telecom industry (or so I've heard).
One of the sad truths about being in the games industry is that many of us work so hard that we don't get to play games. I've never played World of Warcraft. I'm terrified of it. I know that if I started playing it...well, let's just say that I once was so addicted to Civilization 2 that I had to destroy the installation CD. Sadly, I bought a new copy the next afternoon. Even now, if someone even mentions Persians I start to...dear god, I just gave myself a Civ craving.
Fortunately, people in the games industry have gigantic stores of imagination, enough to carry us through droughts where we can't find time to play. And guess what, imaginative people are fucking awesome. They're smart, friendly, open, funny, cool, gracious, curious...the person that deep down we all want to be, but we're afraid we're not.
Yesterday, I got to spend my day with two hundred of these amazing, imaginative people at the first ever social gaming conference, Interplay. It was a privilege, and I thank every single one of you for making our nascent industry feel like a family.
Love,
BT
