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| GDC 2012 by jeep 03/07/2012, 5:49pm PST | ||||
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| I'm in san francisco this year anyway, and I realized I hadn't taken a vacation since I started this contract last july, so I got the cheap pass to gdc which is a pretty short train ride from my apartment. today I went to the expo floor. I don't go to a lot of conference-type things even though I'm the nerd hobby target market poster boy for e3, comicon, gencon, pax, whatever. normally I only get sent to a couple conferences a year for big data or nosql or whatever, and so the first time I walked around the expo floor I had my regular 'conference then bar' process workin, just look at every booth, ask questions of stuff that looks good, and leave, but having fought my way through 10000 goony game devs to get there I decided to go back around and look for other stuff after so I just wrote it all down for you:
on my way in some dudes are having an argument about how bad dungeons and dragons 4th edition is, and how much better 3.5e was, and so as a tribute to their noble suffering I went left first as I walked in through the gate. there's booth babes outside giving everyone NOS to drink. anyone with any sense had a coffee from philz already wtf. there's only maybe a dozen in the expo and everyone does their best to politely ignore them. one german dude told one girl to put some clothes on, but it didn't get a laugh. I wouldn't even mention the girls but I've never been to a conference where this was a thing, and this turns out to be the price of turning left first, rest of the place doesn't have them. it's weird to see how marketing jerks at companies try to get the same effect while minimizing the hooters outfits: one booth has a bunch of same-height-and-haircut pixie blondes and some of them have a suspicious number of six foot models talking in place of the employees. that far left row has some actual hooters outfits...I thought this was the conference that banned this, I don't really like it, and seeing it in person it's just fucking awkward. this isn't some back country mining industry convention where the only attendees are geologists and hookers. anyway everyone was weird about it. I should point out most of the booth babe thing is where all the micropayments and seo booths are. one company has a big poster of a chick's cleavage across from another company with a big poster of a chick's cleavage. and the dude at booth 1 (gotgames.biz) actually said to someone "it's super important that you have cleavage in the character and marketing materials for your game so we can effectively drive traffic to your site." as you say, my lord. stupid marketing fucks and my normal convention filter drive me to look at booths from level3 and rackspace and stuff, which is counter to me 'being on vacation' I walk back through a second time and try to think "what if I gave a shit about middleware accelerator tech" but it doesn't help with those, I just don't care if I had gone right, there's lots of booths for countries no one wants to live in. newfoundland, scotland, chile, korea. west coast of china? I hear that's nice. incidentally they have the "carefully chosen pretty girls up front" thing down, guess how. the small companies are dumb about their booths. put the tech on a big screen right up front, morons. it's a game convention, no one wants to talk to your director of tech. the big companies know this and get it right, the small companies are indistiguishable from nosql companies in terms of marketing ineptitude. compare this to a convention in san jose where the booth was the mongodb developers and their boss. literally the whole group jammed into like 10x10 of space. inept, but they were super nice and it helps that their product is useful. there's a few booths of motions capture bullshit with people in clown suits or something. some of them dance, none of them sell anything or stay in business probably. "cloakworks" is an actual company that makes actual software to just model the motion of clothing on character models. I read about this last year and I couldn't believe they weren't a scam, now that I've met them I believe they are a real company of like 3-5 dudes tops. they had their booth right, at least. the screen was just big enough that you could see the cloak stuff and it was centered and up so he could demo it to one person while other people watched, and they had some novelty mobile shit to show it working everywhere. this is an idiotic product to build a company on unless you're trying to get acquired by speedtree. "now watch the procedurally-generated trees rip the procedurally modeled cloak off the rasterized elf" "game minder" looked alright from a customer perspective, you pick which games you're interested in and it notifies you when they're available for preorder/in retail. the trouble is it's too small again, this is something google could pick up for pocket change and expand across music and movies and shit. the "game of thrones" rpg dev had a big (plastic) iron throne people were getting their picture taken in, but! they had no screens with the game on it or anything the indie game thing was too small and completely packed. I know gdc is a for-profit deal but seriously that is a poor way to feature stuff you're trying to 'support' tomorrow I'll probably go back for the gdc play thing and see what that's like, I kind of grabbed the ticket for this on a whim so it's not like I planned wtf to do anyway here's the thing I walked 3 times. don't let the size of the IGF thing fool your, there was like 40 games in that space and half of the people in the overall convention hall were in that space the whole time I was at the expo. bad form, gdc  |
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GDC 2012 by 03/07/2012, 5:49pm PST  http://www.saurdo.com/12/01/image-resizer-chrome-extension NT by 03/07/2012, 8:36pm PST Newfoundland promoted to country, but then slammed. Call it a wash. NT by 03/08/2012, 12:55am PST phil fish is gonna make someone his bitch by 03/19/2012, 4:25pm PDT I'm playing Shadow Complex right now. by 03/20/2012, 5:34pm PDT Chair was literally created by the Mormon Mafia. NT by 03/20/2012, 8:24pm PDT Erik and Chet gave a talk about Portal 2. NT by 03/21/2012, 1:08pm PDT you're 100% right except by 03/21/2012, 2:32pm PDT Here you go, you lazy excuse-filled faggot. by 03/26/2012, 12:25am PDT Well, at least he didn't have to breathe the same air as Tom Chick NT by 03/26/2012, 1:37am PDT already saw that, it's cool NT by 03/26/2012, 5:41pm PDT |
