MIGS 2012, the future unknown

Several years ago the province of Quebec Canada made a big bet: Give tax credits to game companies in order for them to establish on this side of the Atlantic. Today such a plan sounds obvious, but before the game companies were seen as a game (nothing serious). The bet paid off and now the game is an industry. In Canada out of the 16 thousands job it generates, 8 thousands of them are located in Quebec. Hence the annual celebration of MIGS: Montreal International Game Summit.

This year we were fortunate enough to assist to the event, we’ll share the info. We got a chance to learn or be present on a conference, however the whole event is quite dense and rich on the industry insights.

Keynotes

Tim Sweeny

The founder of Epic games made the introductory Keynote in which he talked about the future of gaming. Among the relevant points he made that we got a chance to assimilate were:

• The package model of gamin (I.e. Selling games on disc) is obsolete
• Free to play will continue to grow
• At any given time, there are 100 million people playing on a mobile device
• Augmented Reality will increase its presence all around

With the last one, we couldn’t agree more 🙂

Peter Molyneux

Unfortunately Mr. Molyneux couldn’t be physically present on the conference (he was schedule to). However he gave the talks through Skype, on it he explained while he couldn’t assist, which was more than justified. The reason was Curiosity, their new video game which far exceeded their expectations. As a result their servers had a melt down, hence the had to focus overtiming the team in order to keep up with the demand. To give you an idea on how it was, their initial estimates were that 50 thousand people will join the game/services in a month. Well, it happen that this number of users join in the same day of release. On a matter of days a millions has been reach. Naturally the services wasn’t designed to scale up to this magnitude. The whole explanation of how, why and when this happens was worth listening. The insights of the industry Mr. Molyneux gave are invaluable.

Another star of the event was the game Papo & Yo, the game creator Vender Caballero gave a talk about how to finance an indie game. I got a chance to catch this talk in the end, since I was on another one of a Google employee (John McCutchan), explaining tools to better analyze memory consumption on games. Of BTW, he was part of the team for PS3 that design the bullet physics.

So, this is a very short summary of an small but very dense event that happen yearly in Montreal. Hope to be there next year 🙂