Casual Games SIG/Conference Calls/July 2006
International Game Developers Association
Table of contents |
[edit] Role Call
[edit] Who's Here
Robert Carrol, James C Smith, Jason Akel, Brian Robbins, Charles Merrin, Margaret Wallace, Wade Tinney, Kane Minkus
[edit] Who's Not
James Gwertzman
[edit] Attendees Anticipated
Robert Carrol, James C Smith, Jason Akel, Brian Robbins, Charles Merrin, Margaret Wallace, Wade Tinney, Kane Minkus, James Gwertzman
[edit] Apologies
[edit] Next Call
Tuesday Aug 1st, 2PM EST
[edit] Introductions
[edit] GDC Submissions
- How do these combine with the Casual Game Summit? do they at all?
- Casual Games Group Gathering
- Brian just needs to talk Jason to get this setup
- Contract Negotiation Session
- gameshow style of presentation?
- Wade will take the lead on this presentation
- Target audience - both developers and publishers
- real-time contract negotiation for an audience?
- Brian will take the lead on this presentation, with Charles
- What is the goal of this session?
- Make everyone more educated
- Want to hit all the major points of a typical casual game contract
- Educate people about the expectations developers can have
- This is really - what kinds of #'s are in a contract?
- What are the levers in a contract negotiation?
- What are values everyone brings to the table?
- Does this become more of a "how to negotiate a contract" session?
- Yes but it is within a given context for negotiation (ie dev-portal, dev-publisher, etc)
- Will people share actual numbers?
- Yes, but we need to have several people do this, not just one company
- Casual Games Post-Mortems
- Robert will take the lead on this
- Would this be better as a written thing?
- Casual Games Award at the GDCA
- Some issues with naming? Downloadable
- Casual Game Review Workshop
- Have multiple tables in the room
- Developers go from table to table showing their ideas, and get suggestions on specific topics
- Jason will take the lead on this and follow up directly with CMP for viability?
- Almost a "newlywed" style gameshow presentation/session or a "dating game"
- Use this for a contract negotiation session?
- Others?
[edit] Process / Governage
- Participation in monthly calls
- SIG Constitution?
- The The Game Writer's SIG has a pretty good one, though their structure is more informal than ours: http://www.igda.org/wiki/index.php/GWSIG_Constitution
- SIG Leadership
- Chair
- Secretary
- Charles can start taking notes on the call
- Others?
- Kane - look at his in-house designer, to see about potentially working on getting us setup into MT
[edit] Goals for the year
List ideas here prior to the call
1. Brian Robbins
a)
b)
c)
2. Jason Akel
a) DRM: Provide a full understanding for developers how they should prepare for and choose various DRMs (more from business perspective than technically), particularly if they plan to self-publish. Catalog the options. Advantages, disadvantages. Pricing ranges. Note DRM and commerce options employed by each of the top ~25 portals/aggregators. Solicit statements from each DRM providers (Trymedia, Digital River, Reflexive, etc.). Solicit comments via IGDA casual list for comments on each.
b) HelpShare Q&A: Create question and answer system like Yahoo! Answers and Google Answers to supplement or even replace boards and build long-term knowledge base. Applicable for all of IGDA. Category for casual games. HelpShare, the only private label Q&A service, is a client of mine and I can arrange for an inexpensive/pay-for-itself deal. Users are rewarded with points or real cash for being selected by question asker as having the best answer to the question. Categories can be custom to IGDA. Already mentioned this to Mitzi McGilvray, IGDA board member, and client of mine (she works for TikGames) - Mitzi likes the idea.
c) Catalog the network reach of the aggregators: Create location for distributors/aggregators to post their networks so developers know where their games are reaching. Create more transparency. Might be difficult to achieve this as they will not want to expose for fear of competition attempting to steal.
3. Robert Carrol
a)Generic Business Information I’d like to work with the SIG and others to collect and post samples of NDA’s, contracts and other useful business documents on the IGDA site as reference materials.
b)Casual Games Post-Mortems I would like to put out a call for people to write up their experiences while developing or publishing games. I’m sure there is a vast wealth of mistakes and successes that the community could learn from. Depending on the response we could create some type of article from publication from this.
c)Standardization There has been a lot of talk about making standard processes in casual game development and distribution. We should be at the forefront of this, though I’m not sure how?
4. James Gwertzman
a)
b)
c)
5. Charles Merrin
a)
b)
c)
6. Kane Minkus
a)Awards
b)
c)
7. James C Smith
a) Facilitate more direct discussions between developers: I want the IGDA to help me connect with my peers (experienced casual games developers) and share information with them. The mailing list is probably the best tool for this. Maybe it could promoted it more and maybe we could do more to initiate discussions on the list.
b) Encourage developers, publishers, and portals to write "articles" or some other format for presenting research findings and theories. Preferably this would be done in a way that could allow for fallow up discussion. For example, Brian F. from Reflexive did research into how download size affects number of downloads, download completion rates, and sales. This includes raw data, analysis, and conclusions. I would like a ‘forum’ for publishing this information and encouraging fallow discussion about it. More importantly, I want to encourage others people in the industry to publish their findings and theories about other topics relevant to casual games. Would this be best done as an article in the quarterly, or a web article, or a forum post, or a mailing list post?
c)
8. Wade Tinney
a)
b)
c)
9. Margaret Wallace
a)
b)
c)
