It is Time to Stop what you have been doing

There are two good excuses for going to trade shows technical knowledge and business knowledge. I’ll examine both as they affect start-ups and innovators in computer and video games, and hopefully show you ways to make the $5,000 cost of getting to a trade show for a week (including beer!) much better value for money. I’ll also dig into what a world in which games are released on 3 to 6 month cycles means for innovators and trade shows.

For most people in the computer games industry, the main reason for going to trade shows like E3 is to see the latest shiny PC and Console games on display from the major manufacturers. The real problem with these from the point of view of a start up is that the products of the major studios and publishers are rather like huge works of fine art, 7 years in gestation, and only able to exist in an ecosystem that has massive up front payments from distributors supported by monster advertising budgets. They rely on complex deals with hardware companies (especially the major processor and graphics manufacturers) as well as complex financial engineering (especially in terms of leveraged finance, tax breaks and pseudo-debt in the form of deferrals and royalties).

In short, trying to learn anything useful to a start up by looking at the major releases is akin to a craftsman blacksmith from Hinkley-cum-Stow visiting a Russian Aluminium Foundry.

Worse, the trade shows completely belie the time taken to deliver a product. Software advances visible (and audible) in a released product were thrashed out in the lab up to seven years previously, worked on for several years, and probably only refined into a working engine and toolset two or three years ago. What you are seeing is the shadow cast forward by historic innovation.

I’ve taken people from other industries to games shows and they are always amazed that so much information is shared. “In our business that technical stuff would all be locked under NDA and patents, and you’d be dismissed for talking about it in public”. The gamer mentality is always to share, always to be consultative and open, and long may that continue. However, trade shows are just too far behind the real innovation curve for that information to have real value: the real value is still in the lab.

There are ways for start ups to get closer to innovation. GDC takes you about a year closer to the start of things. Developers will be showing off products that are in a solid beta release phase (about a year from release in most cases), or, in the case of a brave few, perhaps even alpha releases.

So, despite that, nothing really useful on the start up or technical innovation side can be discerned from major trade shows likes E3 or GDC. You need to get closer to the source to find that, innovators should be aiming at SIGGRAPH, which shares innovations that might only be a year or two old (just out of the lab, but already working).

Which leaves attendance at major trade shows as the computer games cultural equivalent of browsing a fine art gallery: intellectually amusing, but ultimately utterly pointless from a technical point of view.

Save money: don’t go to shows to learn anything technical, go to Siggraph, or even University open days (which are ‘free to $50’) such as Georgia Tech, or Tayside or similar.

You might think that the good news is that Trade shows also have lots of Indie games, iPhone games and other light casual games, and they are not only rising fast (and will soon swamp the dinosaur console and PC traditional games sectors), but their very short lives mean that what is on display is much closer to the point of innovation technically. “Aha!” you might say, “I’ll go learn from them, and start an Indie games company”.  Close, but still no cigar. The problem is that Indie games are made and release on an approximately 18 month timetable, and therefore the annual recurrence of trade shows means what you see is already a whole game cycle behind the leading innovators. Even worse in iPhone and mobile games, where people like ngMoco are releasing games on a 3 to 6 month development cycle. We are now in a world of annual trade shows, but where that covers two games release cycles. If you rely on trade shows, you are missing half the story!

Having knocked the ‘technical value’ argument on the head, what about the business learning?

Well, there is some. I doubt there is anything new to write about the economics of traditional games publishing (other than to write its obituary sometime in the coming decade). Games companies, and especially developers are wonderfully keen to share information technically, as we noted above. They are also good at sharing business learning. OK, when I say ‘they’, I mean developers. Publishers have never really been open or honest about how they really make money, but they are becoming increasingly irrelevant in a world of streamed games, developer-publishers, Facebook and AppStore. Which means developers are learning about publishing, but they are retaining their open and sharing culture, which means there is genuine and valuable information on business models (both current and emerging) to be gained, even at shows like GDC and E3.

Is that the reason for spending money on flights, hotels, beers and passes? Well, it is one of them.

The real reasons go a little deeper

{PART 2 COMING SOON}