Used Games on Valve's Steam: Competition for GameSpot

Valve adds a used game marketplace to the Steam service! Because Steam servers are used to validate games as licensed by particular accounts, Valve has been in an excellent position to offer easy migration of games and game content for some time.

Recently Gamestop, Amazon, and others have provoked the ire of developers such as Mark Rein, David Perry, etc. due to the perceived loss of revenue for developers.

Valve's offering enables developers to assign a resale tax, e.g. of 20% of a used game sale. It also assists with market price point adjustment, since a developer can list games at a full price, and the used market will auction off games at the highest price they can under the new price. As games trickle through the used market, developers continue to receive the highest revenue the market is willing to offer. Nice.

GDC 2009 - My Overview

Gamebryo Lightspeed consumed nearly all my GDC hours. I was slammed with setup, demos, client meetings, partner tech meetings, and selling on the show floor 16 hours a day all week. ;) Friday 11pm when I thought I was finally free, I was pulled into a group of Japanese developers to pitch some more.

Other things I did see:

• OnLive - cloud computing video games delivered via low-latency live video/audio feed. They've got a little hardware box to connect to your TV. AMD has made some vaporware news on this topic too. I'm not certain OnLive will make it, and get publishers to sign on etc... but I am certain that we'll see this technology eventually. More likely that it will stick vs:
• Stereo - NVIDIA has been pushing it, Sony had some R&D passive displays and games with stereo, and some other vendors have contacted me about it too. A nice suit from a market research firm interviewed me on the topic... just about everyone except users and game makers seem keen on this. I'll put my money down that it's a short term flop of a gimmick.
• Engines - So many engine companies... alpha sort: BigWorld, Blade3D, C4, Crytek, Evolution, Gamebryo LightSpeed, Hero, Infernal, Project Offset, Source, Torque, Unity, Unreal, Vicious, Virtools, and some not-yet-announced engines walking the show floor. Somehow I don't think they're all going to make it...
  ... If you checked some out - drop a comment and let me know what you thought.
• Tools - A few different "platform" companies have shown some very nice tools for developers in the works. NDA blocks me, but the good news is that game development on increasingly complex machines will be a tad easier.
  

Mark DeLoura's Game Engine Survey

Mark DeLoura has published results from a Game Engine Survey (part1, part2). Well worth a read for any game developer.

I’m pleased to see that developers are using engines!

55% of the responders stated that they are using a middleware game engine on their current project.

Also, many are using Gamebryo:

39% are using Unreal, and 22% are using Gamebryo, with other engines landing significantly smaller percentages.

Gamebryo 2.6 has been on the market since last fall, and stacks up nicely to the needs developers are expressing: They want tech that works for any genre, Source code, Easy integrations with other middleware, Multi-threading, On target viewers, stand along editors, solid documentation, and real support.

At GDC we’ll be unveiling Gamebryo LightSpeed. (Some press coverage has already gone out.) Looks like we’re on the money with our major new features and tools. Mark’s survey shows developers are demanding tools for rapid prototyping and rapid iteration. We’re delivering just that with LightSpeed, and doing it with the same technology that clients can use all the way to gold master.

Interesting times. I’m glad to have made the transition from internal tech at game studios to a tech company supporting hundreds of games. The industry has rounded the bend on adopting this business model, and from an engineer’s point of view it just makes me feel good to have things built more efficiently.

The Escapist Show coveres the Triangle Global Game Jam

The Triangle site of the global game jam was covered by The Escapist Show:



After the "48 hours later" montage, all games shown were developed by our game jam group.

Triangle Game Conference - Confirmed Speaker

I'm a confirmed speaker for the Triangle Game Conference, April 29 and 30, 2009. There's a good line up of presenters, from companies including:

• Crytek
• Destineer
• Emergent Game Technologies
• Epic
• Insomniac
• Red Storm
• Vicious Cycle
• Virtual Heroes

(Are you surprised to learn that only one of these companies isn't local to the Triangle?)

dAb 3D Painting Research Licensed

[Edit 2010-03-15: A new project at Microsoft has been announced that looks a lot like dAb, Gustav]

In 2000 I collaborated with Bill Baxter on a 3D paint brush system that was presented at Siggraph 2001. Less talk, more video:


dAb: Interactive Haptic Painting with 3D Virtual Brushes (Siggraph01)

Bill continued the line of research for his PhD, and you can see some great improvements to the paint model and brush simulation:


IMPaSTo: A Realistic Model for Paint (NPAR04)


A Versatile Interactive 3D Brush Model (PG2004)

Over the years, we've had a few large companies inquire about licensing the research. I'm excited to say that we've closed a package deal for several systems! Perhaps you'll see this technology in consumer applications in a few years.

For more details, visit the dAb webpage.

Building a Game Engine Product vs Internal Tech

Yesterday I was reminded again of the difference between developing Gamebryo as a product and typical studio internal tech.

Joel, over at Insomniac, mentioned how much he enjoyed only working on one platform, and only supporting one version of Maya. While Gamebryo supports several versions each of Maya, Max, and XSI. We cover Win32 with 2 compilers / 2 versions of DirectX / static & DLL configs, Xbox360, PlayStation 3, and Wii. And, for good measure, we keep some of the code running on Linux.

David Boss also happened to have just given an update on our build system. He's running continuous integration on all platforms with unit tests; a full build; extensive regression tests; and packaging into DVD images. This turns over every night. That's impressive for an engine, tool set, and art library this size!