The GDC 2008 kicked off Monday Sept 15. The exhibit floor seemed very familiar to what I saw in 2007 in terms of technology platforms and vendors, some of the prominent vendor exhibits being Icarus Studios, BigWorld, Simutronics, Multiverse and of course many of the service providers were present – like Vivox and Aria systems.
In terms of the overall roadmap and business models, many vendors continue to focus on “serious games” along with attracting MMO developers and publishers. Learning and education seemed to be primary areas for serious games. There is also an increased focus on the need to get more out of the data from gameplay – improved metrics and deeper data mining.
Icarus Studios exhibited “Fallen Earth” which is now content complete. I believe Fallen Earth would be the first MMO in production on Informix.
In the overall scheme of things, providing rich content and intriguing gameplay to keep customers challenged, happy and coming back still ranked as the top priority. So was there talk around and interest in database technologies ? Indeed yes if you talk to MMO developers who are serious about managing data efficiently and having flexible options to scale data – which by the way most of them are serious about. I am going to blog the database perceptions and challenges in this industry in a separate post – I invite any experiences from you as an MMO developer or publisher on this topic.
