GDC 2008 Insights, Part Four

RPG Vault continues their series of post-GDC reflection articles with a fourth installment featuring comments from BigWorld’s John De Margheriti, Gavin Longhurst, and others.

John De Margheriti, Chief Executive Officer: I focused on meeting some of our BigWorld clients, as well as welcoming and getting to know some of our new staff based in the US, Moscow and China. We took 14 people to the show this year, so it was a big event for us. We used this occasion to discuss upcoming GDCs in China and Austin as well as our plans for these shows.

I wanted to ensure that the developers scheduled to go to the conference were actually able to leave our booth and attend. I hear that most of our staff got to go to at least 75 percent of the talks they wanted to hear, which is really important for both their personal interest and professional development, and the development of our organization. Most years, we have simply been too busy on the expo floor to attend the conference properly. We have now matured and grown as a company, having established our place in the market, and can now send a larger contingent of developers than in previous years. With the ability to send a large group, we were all able to take turns between the exhibit are and the conference, which is a really important part of attending the show.

I also had the opportunity to talk with some of our licensees, and to discuss what their teams are developing using our BigWorld technology. It is fantastic to see the work that is going into these titles and what various teams have been working on with it.

Another goal was to progress with our distribution strategy, to find new products as well as secure distribution options for new BigWorld-powered MMOs being developed for the southeast Asia market. I’m happy that we are making some progress on this, and that our new business unit is attracting strong interest from our licensees, some of who mare very appreciative and supportive of BigWorld’s efforts, which will help them generate revenues in a region of the world they would not normally have focused on.

Console MMOs are still something that developers and publishers have not embraced wholeheartedly. I’m kind of surprised at the lack of innovation, but given the size of the development budget of some of these games, I can see why most MMO developers are developing for a PC market.