The Three Cs of GDC 08: Casuals, Children, and Coreans

When I first began attending GDC it was something of a quiet, staid affair. The exhibitors tended to be all business, showing up to hawk the latest upgrades to their obscure 3D widget creation software, or motion capture suits that required five less neon balls than the other guy’s, thus representing a revolution in the industry.

The attendees (other than the requisite thousand or so who wondered if you could take a look at their resume) largely followed suit, shuffling from meeting to meeting, attending sessions covering such thrilling topics as wireframe mesh creation, and techniques for improved audio editing.

Such was the lack of overall commotion that you could even carry on a conversation in a normal tone of voice, right on the floor of the exhibit hall, without being drowned out or bowled over by a hundred people a minute passing by.

In those days I was fond of saying that if E3 was Vegas, GDC was Laughlin.

But, that was then.

It would seem that with E3 pruned back to a shadow of its former self, and E for All a virtual flop, the hordes of gamers craving their convention fix chose this year to make their stand in San Francisco—to the point that the event’s organizers thought it had gotten so out of hand they’re now mulling following E3 and DICE’s suit and going invitation-only next year.

The 3D widget software and five-less-balls motion capture suit booths were still there, of course. But, this year they were beginning to rub elbows with larger, seemingly consumer-oriented displays from such juggernauts as Sony and Nintendo.

Should another year go by without any sort of mainstream replacement for the E3 That Was, I could easily see another arms race in booth size and swag erupting at traditionally smaller cons such as GDC, and all of us ending up right back where we started again.

Aside from the increase in crowds, some of the more interesting occurrences around the con this year included the Game Outsourcing Summit on Monday and Tuesday… which, honestly, seemed just a tad out of place to me. Almost as if GM were staging a “Moving Production Jobs to Mexico to Maximize Shareholder Value” seminar next door to a UAW union hall in Detroit.

And then there was the public debut of the Emotiv mind-control peripheral… which did not go particularly well. If you’re so inclined, you can read the sordid details right over here at Engaget (including a remark from yours truly in the opening line).

But, aside from everything else, as a journalist there covering the MMO genre, there were three particular areas which stood out to me as head and shoulders above all the rest this year.

I’ve taken the liberty of labeling them…

The Three Cs of GDC 08

The first C, for me, was Casuals.

Now, before we get into the old tired “Casual vs. Hardcore” debate, for those of you who haven’t been keeping current on your industry lingo, apparently, you aren’t even supposed to use the term “hardcore” any more. Hardcore players are now, it seems, “enthusiasts.”

Just as a personal aside, can you marketing people please make up your minds as to what you’re going to call me? First I was “hardcore,” then I was a “core gamer,” and now, I’m suddenly an “enthusiast.”

I’m losing track of where I’m supposed to be pigeonholed.

But, back to the subject at hand:

You know when a convention has a Casual Games Summit every year that there are going to be no shortage of examples of same in the offing.

And, this year in particular, there seemed to be a collective vibe in the air among the gathered purveyors of casual titles:

We’ve all gazed longingly in Blizzard’s direction, and decided we want a piece of the MMO pie for ourselves. But, MMOs are expensive to produce. They also represent a risky gamble, because the average MMO player is nearly impossible to please.

So, we can kill two birds with one stone by making games smaller, faster, cheaper, and marketing them to casuals, who have much more cost-effective standards.

But, how do we make money off of people who expect to play games for free?

That was, quite literally, the billion dollar question. And, I was offered up two similar yet distinct answers to it during my time at GDC.

First up were Alex St John and the team at WildTangent, who have come up with numerous ingenious ways of making money off of people playing their games… without having them ever pay a dime.

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