DemoCamp Vancouver

What’s best way to follow up DemoCampVictoria01? Go to DemoCampVancouver06 – Gaming edition. I saw a lot of familiar faces from the last time I was over; Boris, Brendon, Greg, and Roland just to name a few.

Parveen Kaler talked about iPhone game development, specifically the medium and what it means. He mentioned that the iPhone audience is fundamentally different, you can’t just port a game from one platform to it. ie: They are playing games in transit – on the bus to work/school, so developing a 50 hour game probably isn’t a wise choice.

Dustin Sacks from Sillysoft games had a great demo of his product, Lux Delux. It’s a turn-based strategy much like Risk. Being a former Risk player, I found it to be pretty interesting His company cares a lot about the users community and it’s quite apparent they have a solid base of customers. They even contribute back to the company freely with things such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) and other downloadable apps. He had a lot of solid ideas and content when doing his demo, so I hope to find the time to post in detail about this later.

One of the main points to come out of DemoCampVancouver06 “gaming edition” was that the future of games seems to be “free to play”. This basically means that anybody can grab the game without paying any fees – (via download or some other distribution channel). This begs the question, how do they make their money if the product value is essentially $0.00? The answer is selling premium services as value-add. For example: Say by default every time you die you lose your items. What if you had the option to add “For $2, keep my items when I get killed” – that I agree would be a great way to monetize the game .

This was a great DemoCamp to be at – I’m on the search to find similar stories in Victoria.