Matt Ployhar

By Matt Ployhar

In my last blog, I talked about a spring-cleaning I did on my contacts database and observed the number of companies that have either gone defunct or underwent massive layoffs since the downturn in the economy.

This got me thinking about how or why some ISVs seem to have weathered the storm better than others.

The most interesting transitions occurring are the ones that are completely disrupting multiple platforms and business models simultaneously. However, while I’ve heard some ISVs complain about the big shifts and transitions, I’ve also heard others discussing how to embrace these shifts as an opportunity. Some platforms seem to be better positioned than others in order to address these changes. When all is said and done, it will likely end up being a survival-of-the-fittest exercise.

Here’s how I view and summarize the biggest macro-shifts impacting the games industries. There are four big standouts for me: mobile, format and business model evolutions, globalization, and innovation game-changers. We’ll start with the largest macro-shifts occurring on devices, and in subsequent blogs I’ll cover the rest of the list.

SEGA’s video-game production output for 2010 was winning, to say the least. It included the latest titles in some long-running popular franchises, such as Napoleon: Total War, Sonic Free Riders  and Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing. I talked to Chris Southall, technical director at SEGA, about how Formula 1 and other racing games started his engine and got him interested in game development. He also tells us how the latest technology helps speed the workflow and bring games to life faster and better than it did when he entered the business in 1995.

By Stu Horvath

Innovation takes many forms within the gaming space, often beginning with insight and inspiration from a single person, be they a game developer, an engineer, a sociologist or anything else within the industry. That’s why we’re tracking down these thought leaders to give you a sneak peek of the digital arts future through their eyes.

In this installment, we sit down with Kyle Orland, a games journalist who writes for Gamasutra. Orland gives his thoughts on the impact journalism will have on the future of gaming and the relationship between the two.

Need for Speed World, built by Electronic Arts (EA) Black Box in Burnaby, British Columbia, started a little more than two years ago with a simple idea: become the first real racing MMO. Knowing that racing gamers don’t need to understand the ins and outs of how a car works in order to enjoy zipping along online city streets or race circuits, EA sought to bring this racing MMO to the masses.

I recently caught up with two of the key visionaries behind Need for Speed World. Dave Wall, a 15-year veteran of the gaming industry, is the rendering and systems lead on the Need for Speed franchise. Eneko Bilbao, Black Box’s technical director, has worked on Need for Speed for two years. Together, Wall and Bilbao provide a convincing case for using Agile development, in-game analytics and performance-analyzing tools for creating a rolling-thunder rollout of new game features and optimized game performance.

By Matt Ployhar

Over the past few blogs, I touched on two of the four biggest game-changers I see hitting the gaming ecosystem simultaneously. First, we covered the trends and impact of mobile platforms. Second, we covered the trends and impacts occurring at the format and business levels. For this discussion, we’ll cover what I think is another enormous trend impacting the games market: globalization.

I cannot emphasize the importance of the globalization trend enough. By percentage of market share, as other geographies begin to mature and disposable income rates increase abroad, the U.S. and other traditional gaming geos become smaller as an overall percentage of market share. The primary reasoning behind this is that most of the industrialized nations’ markets have already been saturated with game systems.

Makes sense, but why should we care? There are several reasons why the entire gaming ecosystem should pay heed: source of revenue, more choices, fierce competition, and innovation and growth shifts.

What is the state of my beloved first-person shooter game today? I’ve played Crysis and Quake 4, and even tried some of these games on an Xbox 360, including Halo 1-3 and Gears of War. However, they still just don’t hold that magic for me like they used to.

Ghostbusters was an unusually long project for us. We started in January 2006 with a prototype. For the first nine months of development, we were working on recreating the ballroom scene where Slim is captured from the first movie, obtaining the movie license and getting the green light to develop the project. At the same time, we knew we had something special with the Infernal Engine. A few former Terminal Reality employees wanted to use our technology to create a game for themselves; hence our engine licensing effort began as well.

Generations of children have grown up playing with the Danish LEGO toy bricks. Over the past decade, while those original toys still flourish, kids and kids-at-heart have transitioned to LEGO videogames from developer Traveller’s Tales(TT Games) and the LEGO Company. Just as the LEGO Star Wars toys remain bestsellers over a decade after they were introduced, the LEGO Star Wars video games established developer TT Games as a force to be reckoned with and opened up the floodgates for other licensed games like LEGO Batman, LEGO Indiana Jones, and LEGO Harry Potter. Now, the developer behind all of these blockbuster hits has returned with LEGO Star Wars: The Clone Wars, featuring a brand-new game engine that brings the latest technology to PC gamers.