During my internship at the research and development program Applied Game Design at the Utrecht School of the Arts, I went to the Festival of Games. This article was first published on the AGD blog.
On 19 and 20 April, the annual Festival of Games was held in Jaarbeurs Utrecht, organized by the NLGD (Nederlandse Gamedagen). At this event the games industry gathers to do business as well as share new trends and developments. The event offers a place for developers and publishers to meet in the Pitch & Match area, while game companies can show off their work in the Showcase area. The Festival of Games also hosts the Creative Spirit Conference filled with interesting keynotes and speeches by speakers from the international games industry.
The presentations addressed various topics. One hot topic in particular was mobile games: as Volkert Dressel of Innogames illustrated, smartphones have already taken over the PC in sales and performance. Mobile broadband internet outperforms fixed broadband in developed and emerging countries, like Brazilia. Dressel showed how ‘the gamer’ has changed in the last decennia from someone who is playing alone at a desktop and pays for games upfront, to the modern gamer who is gaming everywhere at every time of the day on multiple devices that are synchronized with each other. Dressel advices developers to plan ahead and develop cross-platform from the start while giving no device advantage over the other. By cross-platform developing and cross-promoting it is more easy to reach the current and a new audience. A web optimized game in the browser is fast and easy: it requires no download and avoids the terms and policies of iTunes and Android stores.
