GDC ~28 Days Later
Hmmm. There were seemingly two different GDC’s under one hood: The traditional PC/console Videogames Industry and the more mass-market Mobile Free-to-Play (“F2P”) games Industry where in-App purchases ruin expand the game experience.
GDC was kinda like turning up to College as a freshman and discovering you know more than the lecturers (well, those ones lecturing on F2P mobile games at least). Turns out a lot of learnings from my 20yrs+ in the online gambling Industry are fairly transportable to the adjacent online videogames Industry, particularly in the realm of casual mobile games and associated F2P models.
Seemingly similar market maturation issues in F2P mobile games too … saturated mobile market dominated by a small number of vast-spending User Acquisition (“UA”) corporate machines forcibly keeping their games in the Top10 leaderboard positions.
Cue Indie developer fatigue, expressed during multiple presentations, which all seemed rooted in the same issue: Discoverability. You can make a great game, but the difficulty in getting noticed has ramped considerably. Consider this: Valve’s STEAM distribution platform PC games apparently released 14,000 new game titles last year alone. That’s a record number, and speaks to the game development pipeline still engorged by 2020/21 game development investment boom. Making a better game within an existing genre or meld of genres won’t cut it these days … you need to do something genuinely innovative to get cut through … which buoyed our startup team’s confidence in our own unique strategy here at Paydirt Games.
OK, so we didn’t learn that much …
… and yet going to Game Developers Conference for the first time was a valid shared experience for myself, my CTO Martin and Head of Talent James. Together, we explored some of the corporate & individual personalities comprising $200BN annual Industry of videogames, one which is (arguably) adjacent to the equally large global Internet gambling Industry.
Under the roof of Moscone Center in San Francisco was a dizzying array of sessions to attend. Martin went to more technical sessions and James went to those offering recruitment/networking opportunities and I orientated towards the business of videogames. So far, so logical (right?). The booths on the exhibition show floor were surprisingly limited in scope, with smaller developers clustered by country, leaning on their governments’ subsidies to present their games with tax payers’ support (the Meta Oculus booth was pretty sizable but verboten for general population).
Industry Sentiment?
Perhaps unsurprisingly negative, with flashes of light in the darkness surrounding Industry layoffs which peaked in Q4 2023. Everyone was pointed towards the future vs. the present. The hangover of 2020/21 will persist, likely into 2025. Too many games financed in 2020/21 still spilling into a saturated consumer environment. Mobile gaming going ex-growth for the first time in more than a decade. F2P mobile games requiring ever-larger budgets for front-end presentation while retaining the tragically-simple gameplay sought by the vast majority of mobile games (match 3, merge, tap-three-times or “T3” coupled to Magician’s Choice Award or “MCA”). Yikes!
Maybe the untold truth of mobile games is a simple one: The expansion of online game players via mobile to extreme mass-markets rewarded the surface-level -simplification (dumbing down?) of videogame gameplay.
What excited Attendees?
Unity’s Apple Vision Pro development presentation had the longest line we saw that week (bodes well for future games, perhaps?).
Predictably Epic Games’ Unreal showcase (almost a separate event) and generally the ‘actual’ videogames side of the GDC sessions were really well attended.
F2P mobile games sessions, were not so well attended … speaking to the malaise surrounding the $90BN mobile games sector reeling from going ex-growth for the first time ever.
N00B Conclusions
Enjoyable. It’s a wildly diverse and inclusive Industry, if that was a representative slice! The passion on show was hugely satisfying to see – these are serious professionals who live for the creation videogames of all types. Good to see videogame Industry veterans mingling openly with civilians (and not cloistered away from the general population).
Some level of fatigue was evident … a lot of attendees were curious where the ‘Web3 Bros’ had all disappeared to (apparently last 2 GDC’s were dominated by presenters extolling the virtues of Web3 games and how Web3 would kill traditional Web2 … no real evidence of that yet, but I guess who knows?).
Also, the massive layoffs from videogame companies large and small was a frequent topic of Q&A sections of presentations. Shocking number of layoffs in Q4 2023 alone, perhaps speaking of the equally massive hiring/onboarding of H2 2020/H1 2021 during COVID re-opening cycle.
Find Anything Cool?
Yes! Personal ‘shout out’ to Gareth Wilson at Metagravity, a solid UK/Polish software innovation story, which showcased their massively multiplayer visual optimization system in Unreal, allowing for unprecedented numbers of 3D characters to be efficiently rendered in a live game environment. Think Medieval armies in combat, scaling castle walls, with LoTR Weta scale virtual actors running on a high-end gaming PC rig. Check out edgeofchaos.io for an instant-take on their solution for ‘hyperscale’ visualizations. I’ve seen nothing like it (in terms of scaled players/NPC actor groups) since ‘Days Gone’ by Bend Studios running impressively on the now-ageing PS4.
What Next for Paydirt Games?
Well heck, we’re on fire right now. Team has recently expanded with the arrival of a Game Designer from League of Legends’ studio RIOT Games in nearby Los Angeles (welcome, Steve Rubin!). We’re fairly well advanced in our Game Concept Demo a.k.a our “Unity Playable” (yes, yes, developed in Unity for speed reasons) which we’ve started play testing, balancing and are now looking to add simplistic Art assets (heh, 99% ‘Developer Graphics’ right now … but there’s beauty in how ugly it looks!). Non-player Characters (NPC’s) are in together with basic PvE systems. Base Game systems are in. Now we’re looking at simulating some PvP interactions. Overall, we’re ahead of where I thought we’d be towards the end of April, but there’s still lots to do (and the usual Development ‘fear factor’ of getting lost down too many rabbit holes vs. staying focused on ‘finding the fun first’). It the game isn’t fun (right now it actually IS fun) then we can’t expect people to play it, or want to continue playing it if there’s insufficient depth to the gameplay systems. Proud of our CTO, the primary gameplay designer until Steve’s arrival yesterday. He’s accomplished a lot, remarkably quickly.
/onwards
Terrible photo of GDC with wobbly-vision AI used to remove people in front of me on the escalator down!
