Sorry, it’s been a while! Among the things I haven’t discussed since the last post were a trip to Las Vegas for the D.I.C.E. Summit for game execs, and the fact that we did the deal I’ve been sideways mentioning for months, and bought ad network Game Advertising Online, which is really a transformative acquisition for us at the UBM Techweb Game Network.
But the big news is Game Developers Conference 2010, which ran from last Tuesday (March 9th) to Saturday (March 13th) at Moscone Center in San Francisco. As our ending press release reveals:
“Organizers of the 2010 Game Developers Conference, the world’s largest industry-only event dedicated to the advancement of interactive entertainment, has announced an all-time record of 18,250 game industry professionals attending San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center for the March 9th-13th event. Surpassing last year’s total of 17,000 attendees, the event – created by the UBM Techweb Game Network – brought together experienced game developers, publishers, deal makers, industry aspirants and working press for more than 400 lectures, panels, summits, tutorials and roundtable discussions.”
The highlights are almost too numerous to mention, but we had major announcements at the show – including Sony debuting its PlayStation Move motion controller and buzzed-about cloud computing/gaming company OnLive revealing its pricing and release date – as well as new product and game announcements from Microsoft, InstantAction, MySpace, Palm, Valve and more.
Along the way, we also had rare and sought-after lectures from big, often secretive names like Nintendo, Google, and World Of Warcraft creator Blizzard, as well as a ‘surprise’ secret lecture at the end of the conference from ‘Phaedrus’, aka SimCity and The Sims creator Will Wright – here’s a round-up of the top announcements and lectures over on our own Gamasutra.
The big media was out in force, too – with the BBC running a piece on social gaming’s rise at the show and CNET/CNN also running a very positive piece on iPhone games and the show overall. And of course, the major game sites like GameSpot have big GDC microsites — including, in their case, videos of the Choice and IGF Awards — for those who’d like to see more.
Overall, we had a really amazing show, and you can see lots of photos (over 500, in fact!) from GDC 2010 at our official Flickr page – now roll on GDC Canada (Vancouver, May), GDC Europe (Cologne, Germany, August), GDC Online (Austin, October), and GDC China (Shanghai, December) — all of which should keep me busy for a while, blimey!