NY Games Conference Day One Wrapup
We’re here in the fancy/expensive end of NYC, right down the street from Gordon Gecko’s office, watching a panel of folks who create and run games ranging from Lord of the Rings Online to the original Everquest speak about the future of gaming and how they’re going to squeeze more money from your wallet. Given that, we’re spending our time letting you know how the first exciting day of the NYGC went. First and foremost, Alex St. John (the man who created DirectX, in case you didn’t know) let slip an amazing quote when speaking about the future of gaming:
“This is the last generation of consoles.”
Quite the prediction, sir. Hit the break for a more detailed breakdown of the rest of day one.
Bright and early, the NYGC hit the ground running at 9 a.m. with a presentation of gaming trends according to a crew of analysts from assorted organizations, most notably Michael Plotz, Senior Manager of Games Business with The NPD Group. Apparently, which isn’t exactly a big shocker, “Women seem to love Mario.”, as pointed out by his statistics. According to the 40k people they poll each week, Mario titles sell with women (and all other members of our species) more than any other game franchise. Also of note was the meteoric rise of music games as profit centers within the videogame industry. “There’s been a tremendous growth in in the music game genre even without including Rock Band and Guitar Hero.”, Plotz said, referencing the Dance Dance Revolution franchise and SingStar, in addition to a few others.
Up next was, from what we saw, the highlight of the conference so far: “Debate Club: Is the Console Hub of the Future or Fighting to Stay Alive?” The aforementioned Alex St. John (Wild Tangent) joined up with John Welch (Play First) in the con category against Justin Townsend (IGA Group) and Robert Stevenson (Atari) in the pro category. Things got heated fast, with Alex St. John and Justin Townsend getting into it over extreme takes on the future of gaming. Unsurprisingly, the consensus reached by the end of the panel was somewhere in the middle. Consoles and PC gaming are changing, evolving — the Wii being held up as the future evolution of console gaming (let’s hope not!).
Heading into the next panel, we found out about how to monetize MMOs and, basically, how they’re going to try and get more of your hard-earned cash. Much like the advertising industry in the middle of the 20th century, MMOs are targeting children and advertising to them. Furthermore, we’re apparently looking at an MMO landscape ten years down the line where everything goes free-to-play with microtransactions, a la Maple Story. Again, let’s hope not.
Last up, the largely business executive audience got a bit of a “reality check” from a panel of teens who were grilled like lab rats for information on what they buy, how they find out about it and what they like. It was, to be totally honest, very interesting and fairly obvious in it’s conclusions. Out of eight kids, two didn’t own Nintendo Wiis and almost none visited gaming websites. Where do they find out about new games? “My brother”, was a common answer. “There’s sometimes big signs in GameStop and stuff. Or my friends.”, also came up a lot. By and large though, these kids heard about games from a pretty scary place, “Commercials on t.v. a lot of times.”, was the answer for more than half of the kids. Apparently they’re not visiting Geekadelphia! For shame!
For now though, we’re heading back into the second day’s panels. We’ll leave you with one particularly juicy quote from President of Sony Online Entertainment John Smedley:
“It’s something we hate… we hate it with a passion.” , regarding gold farming in their MMOs.
