Author's Note: This is the text of an article that I originally wrote to be published on ReadMe. Unfortunately, I did not manage to get it published in time, and due to the timely nature of the subject, it is now too late to do so. In case you, dear reader are interested, here you go:
Everything of Note from GDC 2017
The Game Developers Conference took place this year from the
27th of February to the 3rd of March at the Moscone
Center in San Francisco. The conference brought out many innovations,
especially in the fields of graphics and AR/VR, with speakers from giants in
their respective fields – Facebook, Oculus, Google Play, AMD and NVIDIA, to
list a few, speaking on several aspects of game development – game development,
game promotion, game design, audience engagement and growth, and so on. Several
indie developers also announced exciting new projects. Furthermore, this was
the first GDC that was open for the public to attend, instead of having to watch
from home, so there were much larger crowds than usual.
Here is a list of the most interesting announcements from
the Conference.
The State of the Game
Industry
Every year, the organisers of the Game Developers Conference
poll attendees in an attempt to identify emerging trends in the field, which
they subsequently release in a document titled “The State of Game Industry”.
The key points from this year include:
This year’s GDC showed a slight improvement
in representation, with 20% of attendees polled identifying as women, 2% up
from last year.
The geographical locations of attendees
remained mostly the same, however, with 67% percent of respondents from North
America, 3% from South America, and 22% from Europe. Pan-Asia accounted for 8%
of attendees, and 0.3% percent were from Africa.
Most attendees felt that VR/AR was the
future of gaming, with mobile AR as a specific focus going forward, with as
many as 1 in 10 game makers working on a platform-exclusive VR/AR title, and
75% of attendees saying that they believed VR/AR had long-term sustainability.
The ESports industry is also on the rise in
terms of investor confidence, with 90% of attendees professing confidence in
its sustainability.
PC and mobile devices remain the mainstay
of most developers, however.
On the topic of VR consoles, the HTC Vive
was gaining popularity over the Oculus Rift. Don’t worry, though – the stats
read 24% for the Vive, and 23% for the Rift, with the PSVR coming a distant
third at 13%.
In the mobile arena, Android finally
surpassed IoS in terms of developer interest (54% against 51%).
Interest in mid-cycle console re-releases,
like the PS4 Pro and Xbox Scorpio, however, was mediocre at best, with many
developers feeling that it would only further divide an already fragmented
market.
Innovations in VR/AR
- ·
On the first day of the conference, a slew of
new games was announced for VR devices, specifically for the Rift. These new
games ranged from traditional first-person experiences to a wide variety of
genres – strategy, tactical, turn-based, dungeon crawler, story-driven,
procedurally generated, the list goes on.
- ·
Microsoft announced plans to bring “mixed
reality” headsets to the Xbox and Microsoft Scorpio by 2018.
- ·
Oculus also made a surprise announcement – they
would now sell the Oculus Rift and Touch in a bundle that comes to around $600,
a price drop of about $200. On their own, each piece of hardware is about $100
cheaper, coming to $499 for the Rift headset and $99 for the Touch controllers.
Hats off to Oculus for their efforts to make VR software affordable to a wider
audience.
- ·
AMD have announced that they will be working
with Valve to support Valve’s Asynchronous Reprojection on their graphics
cards, a technology meant to enhance the VR experience and eliminate judder – a
partnership that is a big win for AMD, who have been losing the graphics market
share to NVIDIA.
- ·
Epic Games have announced their Unreal VR
Editor, a ground-breaking extension to the Unreal Engine that allows developers
to be in the environment that they are developing, helping to provide the right
sense of scale to make realistic, believable environments and make it easier to
navigate the environment while developing.
The GDC Awards
On the 1st of March, the Game Developers Choice
Awards and Independent Games Festival Awards took place at GDC. Many much-loved
indie games and many bigger, AAA-standard titles competed for the coveted
awards. A quick recap of the more popular/controversial picks from the GDCA:
GDCA
- ·
The Game of the Year award went, unsurprisingly,
to Blizzard’s new title Overwatch. They single beat out other nominees like
Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 4, and Bethesda/Arkane’s Dishonored 2.
- ·
Niantic’s Pokemon Go won the Best
Mobile/Handheld Game award. The previously almost unknown studio beat out
Supercell’s Clash Royale and companion Pokemon title Sun/Moon, by Game
Freak/The Pokemon Company.
- ·
One of the controversial picks, No Man’s Sky won
the Innovation Award, the troubled game from developer Hello Games.
