If you found my site because you have one of my Business Cars I handed out at GDC, Welcome! And if not, welcome anyway!
So last week was GDC. It was amazing and I got to meet up with a lot of colleagues from my previous jobs! The talks were pretty great, I took away quite a few good ideas I plan to try to implement at Gameloft, so we'll see how it goes. I don't have much time to go into details but here were my big takeaways from GDC this year:
- We need to work on opening up more opportunities for women and minorities in the gaming industry. We have done a lot already but we are not close to matching the market we are participating in.
- More STEM activities for High School and Middle School students
- Squash any type-casting or role-definitions that have a racial or gender bias
- Don't give the cute stuff to women and the hardcore stuff to guys because of their gender for example
- Implement gender-neutral benefits programs like paternity leave instead of maternity leave.
- Recruit from outside the Game industry, good talent can be found in other industries.
- Virtual Reality is the new shiny thing
- People are making great, great advances in the technology
- It's hard to say what the best types of games for this will be.
- Unity 5 came out, with more free features!
- Unreal 4 is free* at least for most small teams!
- There is interesting data on who is paying money on cell phone games.
- Women out-number men playing cell phone games, but men pay more
- Men who also buy $60 console games are more likely to spend money on cell phone games.
- When you become a Tech Lead, don't worry about your programming time vs. management time. You are hired to be a problem solver, the tool you use to solve problems (management vs. coding) doesn't matter.
- Try to regularly have 1 on 1's with each of your programmers. Set expectations clearly and be clear about the methods you use to enforce the culture of your studio.
I'll be excited to go to GDC again! I may go every other year, or every year...I haven't decided yet. It would be great to go and try to do some recruitment too. I saw High Voltage had a great New Orleans themed recruitment booth and they had a line at it all week!