Wednesday of GDC featured all kinds of announcements. My favorite was that Atlanta’s own Molly Proffitt was named one of the IGDA’s VIPs this year for all her work on the IGDA scholars program.
The least favorite announcement was that EA is closing the main Maxis Studio. The one upside to that is that most game industry closings get announced after GDC, in a vain hope to minimize press on the subject. EA at least announced it right before, so Maxis employees have the chance to job hunt here.
Other major announcements were that the PS4 has sold more than 20 million units, Phil Harrison left Microsoft, Monument Valley and Shadow of Mordor are good games and Valve is still doing cool things.
Between meetings and parties I managed to pop into a couple sessions. The best was, of course, the IGDA Advocacy training 🙂 It went well, and the attendees left very enthused to expand their work as developer-advocates.
My second favorite session was Drew Crecente’s session on using games to combat teen dating violence. Drew runs Jennifer Ann’s Group, and has found games one of the best ways to raise awareness of this issue. He had a great audience, and it’s always good to see a crowd leave a session revved about about making games on a topic like this one.
The last session I attended was one by a journalist who figured out a way to determine how many Steam uses had licenses for various games, the best method currently available to the public to determine what games were doing the best. He seemed concerned that the top 15%Â of games had 80%Â of the Steam sales. Of all the games on Steam, only 213 have sold a million copies. That does not bother me as much. It just shows how much space there is for everyone else.