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Development realities of 'games as a service' revealed at GDC

The notion of operating "games as a service" is gaining traction in the industry, but the nitty-gritty details of pulling it off from a mobile game maker's perspective can often seem frustratingly vague.
If you're attending the 2015 Game Developers Conference in March, you probably already know how to make a great game. But how do you develop and deliver weekly content to your players, and how do you then take the analytics data your players give you and use it effectively to iterate on your core design? What if you're a small studio, or an indie team working out of your apartments?

See how top F2P spenders are shaping our industry at GDC 2015

Back in 2013, Kongregate cofounder Emily Greer delivered an insightful GDC talk about best practices for free-to-play game design.
Next March she returns to the conference to delve deeper into what makes F2P games tick: those big spenders we often call "whales."
In her upcoming GDC 2015 talk, "Don't Call Them Whales: F2P Spenders and Virtual Value," Greer (a self-professed stats geek) will examine this phenomenon by looking at demographics, play and buying patterns for top spenders on the Kongregate web platform and mobile games, how expectations of game spending and value are formed, and how attitudes toward spenders and spending shape the whole industry -- not just free-to-play games.

See how Storm8 cooks up a successful mobile sim game at GDC 2015

Designing a satisfying simulation game is hard. Working within the constraints of contemporary mobile devices makes it even harder, but Storm8 game design chief Dan Scheidegger led his team of developers to do just that with the Restaurant Story franchise and now he's coming to GDC 2015 in March to explain how they pulled it off.
During his talk, "Perfecting the Recipe for Mobile Success: Restaurant Story 2 Postmortem," Scheidegger will walk you through the development and launch of Storm8's remarkably successful 3D mobile restaurateur sim.

How did Ubisoft take Assassin's Creed co-op? Find out at GDC 2015

Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Unity launches this week, and Ubisoft AI programmer Charles Lefebvre believes one of the biggest challenges his team faced in shipping the game was figuring out how to make the series' traditional gameplay tenets work in a four-player cooperative multiplayer session.
Attend GDC 2015 next March to hear Lefebvre explain the solutions Ubisoft implemented to replicate that gameplay and the underlying AI. His talk, "Networking Gameplay and AI in Assassin's Creed Unity," will break down the design of systems like assassin spawning, gameplay mechanics and NPC AI behaviors.

Learn how thatgamecompany recruits top talent at GDC 2015

It's far too easy to let practical studio management concerns like hiring great talent take a backseat to the practical day-to-day demands of game development.
Born of necessity, confined to HR personnel and often executed in a less than elegant fashion, your hiring strategy can actually reflect the character of your studio as much as your games do.
Thatgamecompany (Flower, Journey) studio manager Sunni Pavlovic has a truckload of experience optimizing hiring strategies to find and retain top game development talent to build efficient, comfortable teams, and she's coming to GDC 2015 next March to explain how she does it -- and how you can do it too.

GDC's Experimental Gameplay Workshop needs your crazy prototypes

Developers, the organizers of the perennially popular Experimental Gameplay Workshop have issued a new call for submissions of experimental video games and game prototypes. The more interesting or offbeat they are, the better.
Selected titles will earn a slot in the two-hour Experimental Gameplay Workshop session at GDC 2015 in San Francisco, which aims to showcase an eclectic mix of unusual game concepts that explore new ideas and genres.

How do young people think about games? Find out at GDC 2015

Well-known parenting educator and author Rosalind Wiseman is teaming up with game industry personality Ashly Burch to tackle a challenging topic at GDC 2015: How do young people feel about modern video games?
More specifically, how do young women feel about them, and how might that affect the next generation of game development? You can find out by attending GDC in San Francisco next March and sitting in on Burch and Wiseman's "Curiosity, Courage, and Camouflage: Revealing the Gaming Habits of Teen Girls" presentation.

IGF 2015 welcomes packed lineup of Main Competition entrants

The 17th annual Independent Games Festival -- the longest-running and largest showcase for independent developers -- recently closed its call for submissions, and officials are proud to announce the festival has seen more than 600 entries for its Main Competition once again.
In total, the festival -- which is co-located with Game Developers Conference 2015 -- attracted 639 Main Competition entries from both established indie developers and first-time entrants.

See how third-party developers can make your game better at GDC

No matter how good your game is, CCP Games technical designer Regner Blok-Andersen is betting it could probably be improved if you opened it up to third-party developers.
But how, and how much do you expose? Blok-Andersen is coming to GDC 2015 in San Francisco next March to talk you through the topic, offering concrete examples of things you can expose to third-party developers and what the results of doing so might be using examples drawn from CCP's development of EVE Online.

ALT.CTRL.GDC needs your one-of-a-kind alternative controller games!

Game Developers Conference 2015 has opened a call for submissions to ALT.CTRL.GDC -- an on-site special exhibit focusing on unique control methods for playing games.
The much-lauded ALT.CTRL.GDC returns to GDC from March 4-6. The exhibit is open for submissions until December 23rd for indie-centric one-of-a-kind game peripherals, contraptions, and novelties which enhance game experiences and challenge traditional forms of input.

Learn how the Far Cry 4 team works so efficiently at GDC 2015

Ubisoft engine architect Remi Quenin has spent a lot of time thinking about how the Far Cry 4 team can waste as little time as possible waiting on boring-yet-necessary production tasks like compiling code.
With his guidance the development team has been able to achieve massive improvements in their day-to-day workflow, and next March he's coming to GDC 2015 in San Francisco to share his expertise with some of the best and brightest game makers in the business.

GDC Next: Lecture recommendations for press

[Simon Carless serves as EVP of the GDC shows, and in advance of next week's GDC Next event he's taken the time to share a list issued to press attendees that highlights some of the show's notable talks.]
Ahead of our GDC Next show in Los Angeles next week, our press liaison firm FortySeven Communications has again worked with us to put together a list of some of the most interesting lectures - especially those that could work well when written up for a larger audience.
We don't always publish these to the public. But both for the benefit of press that might not have spotted them yet, and for those people who want to see some of the 'newsier' (and some of the worthwhile and less news-y) talks at the show this week, here it is.

Developers, get ready: GDC Next kicks off on Monday

Developers, get ready: GDC Next 2014 featuring ADC descends upon the Los Angeles Convention Center next week.
If you haven't already, there's still time to register online for a GDC Next pass that grants you access to a wide variety of talks, roundtable discussions, postmortems and workshops during the show.
Attendees are encouraged to plan ahead and bookmark their favorite talks in the online GDC Next 2014 Session Scheduler, especially these 9 can't-miss GDC Next talks.

How can public Steam data inform game devs? Find out at GDC 2015

Registration for GDC 2015 just opened earlier this month, and already we've got a handful of great sessions lined up for the show that developers won't want to miss.
If you have even a passing interest in the PC game market you may recall that Ars Technica senior gaming editor Kyle Orland published an interesting report about the most popular games on Steam earlier this year. He wrote it using reams of data culled from Ars' "Steam Gauge" project, which used PHP/MySQL code to trawl through thousands of public Steam Community profiles and sample data.
It's one of the most ambitious independent Steam data-mining projects ever attempted. Now, Orland is coming to GDC 2015 in March to share what he's learned and run down what it tells us about the state of today's PC games market.

9 GDC Next talks you shouldn't miss

Developers, take note: Passes for next week's GDC Next 2014 featuring ADC are still available, and today we're highlighting a few of our favorite can't-miss sessions from the forthcoming future-focused conference.
Game industry veteran Raph Koster, Skulls of the Shogun programming wizard Borut Pfeiffer, game industry attorney Mona Ibrahim and the indie game makers behind the Voltron-esque developer collective Glitch City are just a few of the notable experts that are speaking at GDC Next this year.

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