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Lessons from the Sessions : NASSCOM Gaming Forum Meetup, Hyderabad
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By Soumalaya Chakraborty
Published: Jul 22 2013
Gaming enthusiasts and industry experts trooped into the IIIT campus for the Hyderabad edition of NASSCOM’s gaming forum meetup. The meetup comprised of 3 sessions by Vinnie Reddy on the current industry scenario with reference to console and PC gaming, the graphics team from Glu games on gaming art and our own game designer Ravi Mantena on monetization in social games.
The [x]cube LABS team was 12 members strong and all of us were looking forward to the sessions as well as learning more about the incubation center for startups that IIIT currently offers. One of the exciting aspects of the incubation center is that there are numerous gaming startups who are working on some really cool concepts.
The session commenced with Vinnie Reddy, the founder and CEO of BlueGiant Interactive, taking the stage with his insights on the current trends of PC and Console gaming industry. The crux of his session, to which YesGnome CEO Sridhar Muppidi contributed a great deal, was that PC gaming is going through a difficult phase and the way to the future for gaming organizations would be to focus on mobile. The audience were treated to valuable insights on publishing games through 3rd party organizations, nuances of marketing, user acquisition and the importance of building prominent IP-based games such as Star Trek which offer a cheap avenue of reaching out to millions of users virally owing to the IP’s fan following. The session offered a lot of value in helping us understand industry practices and trends.
Vinnie’s session was followed by Ravi’s presentation on monetization in social games and the various categories of premium purchases. The session was a detailed account on the differences between consumable purchases (purchases which have to be made repeatedly in order to progress faster) and durables (once bought, they are available to the players forever). Using plenty of illustrations from a bunch of popular games and our in-house titles, Ravi clearly outlined some crucial game design strategies which would help aspiring designers decide the type of content appropriate to the genre they are working on.
The final presentation of the event was by Glu on game art. Two of their senior artists took us through a detailed description of art as it develops from concepts to final, polished products. In the course of their presentation, they also answered important questions on handling multiple resolutions (relevant especially for Android devices), best practices when it comes to planning for large development projects and the importance of pre-production and concept art phases.
Overall it was a thoroughly informative day as discussions progressed well beyond the seminar hall into the cafeteria. We returned looking forward to translate some of the knowledge gained into practice.
Tags: nasscom