I've just got back home from the first day at Develop, with a dictaphone filled with interviews, but also - unfortunately - the remnants of a hangover from last night's pub quiz. It was great to see four teams made up of Gamesblog readers - really hope you enjoyed the night. We're in discussions with Game City about running a follow-up there, so get swotting up on your game trivia...
I'll start posting my stuff from Develop tomorrow, but for now, here's some good stuff from around the web...
Warhammer Online creative director Paul Barnett gave the talk of the day, relating the somewhat taxing development process of this potential WoW beater. Both Eurogamer and Gamesindustry.biz have interesting excerpts, with Barnett essentially criticising MMO developers for slavishly cribbing Blizzard's epic. I also spoke to Barnett who gave me some fascinating stuff on game design theory - more of that later.
Meanwhile, Pocketgamer.biz has lots of stuff from M:Metric analyst Alistair Hill's stat-packed chat:
He started with some basic facts. There are 47.5 million mobile users in the UK, of whom 28.4 per cent are classed as 'mobile media users' - defined as anyone who browses, downloads or uses an application. That's 13.5 million Brits.
"It's getting towards tipping point," says Hill, citing 30 per cent as a commonly accepted definition of a tipping point, where something becomes "ingrained in our society".
His first graph showed that playing a game is the largest behaviour of mobile media - around 30 per cent of mobile users do it in most countries. That's play mobile games, rather than purchase, mind.
Interestingly Hill also showed that the most popular mobile gaming genres in Europe are arcade puzzle, strategy, quiz and word or number games. But as Pocket Gamer's Stuart Dredge points out, "There are still shedloads more action games out there than there is demand for them. Yet there are still less arcade puzzle, card, casino and quiz games than there is demand". Yep, the industry is making the wrong games. And lots of them. The Washington Post has a quick round-up on the rest of the mobile stuff, including Nokia's hints that it may start developing games with the same assets as XBLA and PSN projects, possibly suggesting some multi-platform and perhaps even cross-platform titles. This certainly seems to be the direction the company is going in, indicated by the excellent N-Gage title, Reset Generation - which I'm still waiting for Nokia to supply me with. Hello? Nokia? HELLO?!
