Video: #1ReasonToBe panel inspires industry at GDC 2013. Gender issue a chicken and egg problem, says Monaco dev. Much of the talk at last month's Game Developers Conference was about gender issues.
The week before the show, fallout from sexual jokes made by attendees at PyCon developer conference put gender issues in tech at the forefront of our collective consciousness. During the show, there were panels on diversity and the #1ReasonWhy hashtag. It spilled out into after-hours events as well, with Brenda Romero resigning from her role with the International Game Developers Association after the group paid models to dance at its party. On the last day of the show, GamesIndustry International caught up with Pocketwatch Games' Andy Schatz, whose game Monaco won the Independent Games Festival grand prize in 2010 and is completing its long road to release later this month. While the interview covered a range of issues facing independent developers, it started like many GDC-week conversations, with gender. Andy Schatz "We've got a chicken and egg problem," Schatz said. Monaco launches April 24. Cloning Case Files: Vlambeer. Cloning Case Files is a three-part series examining the personal impact of game cloning in the iOS app store.
Each entry details the experience of an independent developer who suffered in some way from game cloning and how they worked to overcome the effects of cloning. This is part one. Here is part two and here is part three. - Ed. It's July 2011. Northern California. In less than a month, a small game development studio is going to release its iOS baby to the world. That's when things get interesting. It's July 2010. An independent game designer named Jan Willem Nijman is watching a documentary about tuna fish. At their development studio, Vlambeer, Nijman and his development partner, Rami Ismail, sell the tuna fish hunting idea as a Flash game to Bored.com and publish it asRadical Fishing on November 12, 2010. It's July 2011. Nijman and Ismail are sitting in their offices, watching a trailer for an iOS game that's going to be released in under a month. THQ - A Victim Of Market Change And Corporate Inertia. I'm not sure if anyone really expected THQ to weather the storm.
Hoped, certainly, but hope and expectation are not the same things, and it would have taken equally huge doses of optimism and delusion to believe that THQ's business could continue in its present form. Placing Jason Rubin at the company's helm was unquestionably a good move - the Naughty Dog founder has an enviable track record and quite rightly commands the respect of the industry - but by the time he took the role, THQ's stock had already crashed and layoffs were well underway. The company was mortally wounded; Rubin's failure to resuscitate his terminally ill patient should not reflect in any way on his own talents and abilities. In the end, THQ's fate has been moderately ignominious, with the firm's development studios and intellectual properties being carved up between industry rivals in a widely reported asset sale.
What, though, are we to list as the cause of death? New Consoles, Same Old Story. If you have even a passing interest in the games industry, there's a good chance you've spent much of the last week thinking about boxes.
Nintendo's latest box, perhaps, which has limped from an inauspicious start into a post-Christmas funk that has analysts wringing their hands with delight (or dismay, depending on where they placed their bets). Or maybe its Sony's new box, source of the raging torrent of rumours and half-truths that have clogged the news-ways this month. Indeed, if you're given to nostalgia, the boxes on your mind may even be the three sitting beside your TV or gathering dust atop the wardrobe, soon to be little more than futuristic doorstops. "My interest in a new generation of consoles ends at 5pm sharp, when another working day draws to a close" Historically, I have greeted these moments of transition with barely concealed glee, hungry for every nugget of information about the hardware that, in an ideal world, would dominate my spare hours.
Where to find indie games. Indie Game Demos.