GDC 2012 – Wednesday Recap

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Another great round of talks today. I spent a good deal of the day in meetings, but attended two fantastic sessions. One was from the company that bought the failed APB game.

APB monetization challenges

  • hailand rising
  • APB reloaded
  • fallen earth
  • UGC – assisted publishing
  • reloaded games
  • platform@reloadedinc.com
  • sword of new world
  • freetoplay they own trademark!
  • they set M title
  • music editor in game!
  • unreal mgmt server system
  • amazing custom character

merging ok with losing

    1. bad missions
    2. skill ratings system sucks
      • curve matching Bayesian matching
      • if win first match 30% to spend $
    3. rewarding bad behavior
      • encouraged cheating/tools
      • went to double threat = bad

map inflexibility

      too large, no noob zone, too procedural, no manual map building.

had to build NEW all by hand

no signposts

removing tutorial = 20% bump in retention, learned ease/accessible

?tutorial: why not make it better?

  • scammers/cheaters/dos attacks/game optimization
    • gear, guns, cars, clothing
    • time-savings

    premium accounts
    -shorten time
    weapons added trials
    gear-cosmetics is lowest revenue
    -monetization it was NOT important
    end of match push buy premium
    1000 days to find f2p peak
    plan for peak revenue
    140k
    .5 players
    shooting for $30 arpu

Technical Art of Diablo 3

The second talk was from Blizzards Lead technical artist regarding how their technical art team evolved over the course of Diablo 3 production.

Takeaways:

    • turned into imagineers
    • by allowing for rapid iteration with tools able to become designers

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