Meeting wrap-up June 3, 2002

Compiled by Karl Fasick

Pictorial

About 35 people attended the May meeting which took place on the 5th floor of the Art Institute.

A few of the folks who attended E3 talked about the experience this year: Nothing totally new this year, more the next logical step from last year. Tons of visibility in the console games. Booths had multiple stations where you could play their games. By comparison PC titles seemed fewer. A few favorites were mentioned: The Two Towers, Impossible Creatures, Star Wars Galaxies.

Brian Robbins and Gary Rosenzweig from CleverMedia and Wyeth Ridgeway of Leviathan Games presented their experience working on Web based games.

Our next meeting will be on Monday July 1st at 7:00PM. We should be back in our regular room in the penthouse on the 10th floor of The Art Institute of Colorado. We'll be breaking out with four different topics into the corners of the room for mini discussions. Please come with ideas you'd like to talk about or hear about and we'll be voting on the most popular four topics at the start of the meeting.

Here were a few topics brainstormed during the meeting for next time:

• Programming and Code optimization
• Q&A
• Creative design process
• Addictive elements
• Independent self publishing vs. selling to a big company
• PDA and Wireless games (Intel folks care to contribute?)

Presentation: Web Based Games

With Brian Robbins and Gary Rosenzweig from CleverMedia and Wyeth Ridgeway of Leviathan Games

Gary Rosenzweig, Chief Engineer and owner of CleverMedia, on Technology of Web based games:

Web based games are anything you play inside your web browser. They range from simple html based games you play in your browser to advanced 3d games that require plug-ins. Games written in HTML, JavaScript and VBscript won't be popular commercially as they allow you to view and copy source code. Shockwave, Flash or any other Active-X plug-ins are very popular. Java used to have the advantage of not requiring a plug-in but since Flash comes preinstalled in many installations and Shockwave automatically installs they now are much more popular. Flash has 90-95% penetration in the customer base, Shockwave 60-65%.

Java can be written in a text editor. Flash and Shockwave need authoring tools. Flash is vector based and slowest of the three. Shockwave can be developed very quickly.

Brian Robbins, Senior Software Engineer of CleverMedia on the Business side of Web based games:

CleverMedia has shifted from a banner ad driven model to Advergames, or licensed games. These are either existing games with logos and advertising added, or entirely new custom designed games made to advertise.

PopCap makes games like Diamond Mine/Bejeweled. They market their addictive games on as many different sites as possible and try to make a little bit of money in as many places as possible. This has the advantage of making the income more stable over time.

Another approach is to license games to small sites like home pages and such for a fee.

Wyeth Ridgeway, President, Technical Director and Board Member of Leviathan Games:

Leviathan has been developing for the WildTangent web driver, a plug in that allows full 3D graphics launched from a web page. They seem like a PC CD-ROM game but are delivered via the web.

Virtools is a visual programming/development environment with a Web delivery. You can program games on a very high level graphically on the screen by pulling blocks of code together. Very popular for the Advergame market. It's also multiplatform

Anark is a Boulder, Colorado company that makes a powerful 3D Web plug-in that fully integrates multimedia video, audio and 3D delivery in the browser. NVIDIA did their Wolfman demo using Anark.

Companies typically have 50-300K to spend to market something. Much bigger than Wal-Mart bin games which are typically about sub 40K to develop.

Hyundai wanted to market their rally inspired car, the Tiburon. They wanted a simulation they could put in a booth at the rallys, then later have the same game available to play at home. Leviathan Games was able to make a fully 3D game that launched via the browser in the sim booth but ran in full screen mode. No one could tell it was a web delivered game.

Leviathan games range from 2-9MB in size. Gary's can be as small as 5K up to a maximum of 500K. The bulk of the downloads is in the sound assets

The Real Arcade and Real are said to have 200 million registered users. Real Arcade is really two different things. To the subscribers, it is a channel based game subscription. To developers it is a distribution medium bundled with the LithTech. You make a game using the LithTech engine but sell it only through the Real Arcade.

Yahoo started a premium subscriber model but there is too much free stuff to play that it's hard to get people to pay to play the premium games.

Traffic demographics: Outside of the US, South Korea accounts for much of the download traffic. Very high gaming population there. 61% of downloaders are women during office hours, possibly on lunch breaks.

Some games have low conversion rates to paying customers but make it up in sheer numbers of downloads. Bejeweled is maybe only .1%.

Gary's wife runs a used bookstore called The Attic Bookstore at the corner of Alameda and Pennsylvania in Denver. Unclaimed game development books given away at the meeting ended up there.

Pictorial

Bruce Mitchener and Luke from Worlds Apart sharing a joke

Mike Boyle and Keith Ho from VR1 and Kory Bricker

The group gets ready for the round table

Wyeth Ridgeway from Leviathan Games and Brian Robbins from CleverMedia prepare for the roundtable

Gary Rosenzweig from CleverMedia talking during the Web Based Games roundtable

Group shot

Happy people

Dusty (left) and Eric Dybsand (right) talking with another attendee