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Create free accountI don't want to scare max and and but I might scare you a little bit and I don't want to scare you I have a disclosure to make if you ever met especially Yanni but if you met any of them but especially any like if you are easily offended or you have you are like very strongly con you have very strong convictions cover your ears every now and then because the idea here is to discuss the future of mobile games and in games and PC and switch and VR er and we tend especially when Yanni and I are on the same environment we kind of tend of being extremely realistic kind of gruff and not say things that people like very
much so just keep it with us well to start first of all could you please well introduce yourselves or no Markus already but just tell who you are yeah yeah thanks so yes our mark is put in I run a UK studio called blue tennis studios and we make comics acquisitive reality VR and also traditional games as well card games hi everyone I think Patti introduced me a joke I'm the founder or CEO of secret exit is an indie company here in Helsinki were over 10 years old and really we just developed the games self-publish on our own IP and try to maintain control in what we do all right hi I'm max it says I'm independent I am NOT a developer to the shock of everyone here I'm a researcher I research eSports recently
also VR AR so if you want to know stuff about eSports game streaming on the right person to ask if you want to stop about unity or game development please don't come near me out for the be able to ask your question at all so this kind of quick disclaimer here alright let's go and if you don't know who I am my name is Patti to lead you have been seeing me here all day but I just realized I never actually introduced myself I work with two media I'm the person who actually chose these people to be here all of them in all the rooms so if you didn't like your speakers you can punch me afterwards I'm the one to blame for that I was a game developer before was game publisher and have been working with the creative media for many many years let's put it this way I don't want to tell away how old I am and the reason why I put this panel this way is because I wanted to put together
people that develop mobile PC we are a are a sport that work the research eSports and know about different aspects of of the development and of research so they could present to us what is going on and what we should be looking at so my first question is gonna be very very maybe not easy but very deep is what do you think are the eminent challenges that we're gonna there we are facing in games in business in users and and technology well I think the biggest challenge we face is the business side and I think it's acquisition understanding what acquisition is in terms of users and the business case for developing games seems to get every year gets harder and harder especially when you're an indie I don't about for you
guys it goes in the over here but in the UK it's quite a challenge to run a business and we do other things literally so that we can we can do the things that we do in games the idea of the fact that you have to put more and more money into reaching your audience is a scary thing for me go yeah Nikhil it don't go well yeah in in the short-term running the regular businesses is becoming more and more challenging we're looking at yes different difficulties in user acquisition difficulties in in finding influencers difficulties in finding any sort of discoverability for our titles in the long run though I think the trouble will be like how do we develop
on hardware that no longer has an electrical grid to maintain it so like a PC is a very power hungry device and if you're only getting electricity for six hours a day and that's for essentials then like you're stuck to running a solar-powered device you have a something attached to a lithium battery probably something like a Raspberry Pi let's say if your family if your license service have crashed they're not Autodesk software unity Adobe there they're not there anymore so yes you can solve that in the short term by resorting to unofficial means but if you need to maintain the software and get updates well you you need to resort back to open software yeah yeah great from our perspective we can become very reliant on development platforms and
that can bond us in the bun as you say energy dependency but also license costs the way that large enterprises change their business model you get dependent who you join you use tools and hey they're free yeah great hey by the way we're gonna in five years to change the license model and you're gonna bust your balls to try and pay the license and you're gonna try and see if you can gain any profit from the revenue that comes through the app store and you have to pay 30 percent can that be yeah I think in general no matter how you look at our impending doom or this earth of ours I think if you just take like maybe even a shorter term term you and this I think kind of this dependability and also predictability is quite difficult if just looking at the game sector and and
looking at you know what's happened in the last year's so for example within the realm of like competitive games eSports and all that well at fortnight other people ask me what fortnight all from like the people you mentioned in competition the people interesting like the kids are playing for at night I mean ask 200 times per journalist to the fortnightly band and stuff like that and I'm not exactly sure when fortnight was launched but it's just amazing that you can have like this game it's so popular right now has so many users kind of biggest in the world and just a few years ago nobody knew what fortnight was jerilyn if you ask was fortnight if you from the UK you know it means two weeks that's what that that's about it so it's quite how much can happen in such a short time in this industry which is kind of peculiar and doesn't really happen that fast neither industries even though of course the kind of rate of change is accelerating you know the other thing is thought no it is it is it
okay now I look at old person there but you know actually my definition of what a game is sometimes I think therefore doesn't actually quite meet it and maybe well I don't I mean that's a question as well as a as my more cynical response is that have expectations if we're not careful expectations of what a game does share where we get out of it are we are we just lowering the barrier or are we discovering a new form of art I don't know Wow yes sir wait for that before no no it's I've found that like one thing that I've learned through Dec some decades of playing games is that certainly the what we define a game and what we expect from a game has changed on a cultural level that's certainly true I mean let's say that for me gaming in in some way peaked
in in the late 90s I mean we had LucasArts adventures we had x-wing and well liked wonderful deep games and then we've gone through the slippery slope of casual things and and now we're talking about throwing in terms like hyper casual I mean do we really need to create a genre for flappy bird I find that strange and and of course in the near future we define game is two men entering and only one leaving exactly I I know that a lot of the talks have been about bigger companies how they did it how they made it how they were successful what were their recipes and it's mostly what people want to hear I would like you I know a lot of people here and a lot of people in the conference are actually
students or people developing in their first game or just doing their first demo and they are not in the position of discussing how groovy or supercell or any other company did so as we're talking about the future I would like you to tell a bit like what do you think that a person that is starting right now has nothing maybe has a friend and two feet to three people and they are developing their first game to diverse platforms what should they be looking at like what is the reality that they are gonna get like now and until they can actually succeed I throw you in well power of again will be at a high cost so whatever you do I would focus on things that leave us much to the
imagination as possible and something that is probably episodic like when when when your food actually depends on on people exchanging goods and services in order in in exchange for the service of entertainment that you provide them you probably want them to come back with the SD card and a bag of apples and then you can put the your game on the SD card and they can experience the next episode piracy is really really really critical at this point I mean you're building your loyal fanbase is a life and death situation I told you he would I told you he would get apocalyptical today so I was gonna ask do you think it's an important factor I kind of what kind of mercenaries you hired to protect your convoy when you're going from your like development Hut to the market is that that's the key key factor here in
development I would say probably or logistics absolutely the again your development tools are quite primitive you no longer you probably shouldn't run 3d graphics again your audience they're no longer playing on pcs or consoles because they are to power hungry devices the only thing remaining at this point are they're slowly rotting Android phones that can side load software iPhone users are a lock they can side load yeah I second that they're screwed okay and they've got a notch in the top they're missing bits of the screen that's that's nuts let's go make money out of a crappy phone and is that work but there is a there's so much truth to what you've said a bit about about power and apples as well as so like if you're going to bring apples and an SD card make sure those apples are local grown why are you selling me apples from miles and miles away a co - that's ridiculous actually you know you think about it why are we using tools that haven't been
community-developed that you know for people coming into the industry now one of the things I would say is be as disruptive as hell say no say bollocks to things and play everything be a games lover first I think you've gotta love games if you are in it to make money go away because actually it's it's being centered on making really good games it doesn't matter if you're using augmented reality virtual reality if you're going to incorporate blockchain hey go hey can you make a blockchain game I mean I can see loads of people here probably could make a blockchain game can you make a game that's really good fun I don't know how many there might be not so many right yeah come at the boxing game come on you only know occasionally but the the point of this previous thing also is
that just just like you said we're dependent on our tools and that's it's a curse as well as a blessing like we're more productive in creating digital entertainment now than we've ever been I mean basically in unity you pardon me for saying this but you just you know download assets from the App Store you drop them in your scene you press play in that sense and so like pop G kinda like I didn't know what the game was some of someone's streaming it and I was like man so you can make like a successful streamed game by just downloading stuff from the asset store because that's how it looked it looked really like in my eyes kind of unpolished and exactly like you would you know one of those top ten free items kind of big batch of military themed themed stuff that you can then use throw in and if your it sounds familiar if you're like student and you done game game development in like some school that that's what you do in a course basically I agree and that's kind
of also kind of reflective on how dependent especially smaller teams and companies are not developing their own engine or something are have become of like the the tools in the marketplace and so on that kind of help us make the job easier what I'm driving for is the the key importance of a lot of low level knowledge the the fact that many schools these days are teaching us how to use our fancy tools but we lack the low level knowledge of understanding how they work we're we're also confusing art with the tools of art like if a kid is going to school to learn art they should learn art not to use Photoshop there's a key difference here you you apply your understanding of art in the tools that you can learn elsewhere but but the fact is like after unity is gone there will be nobody left who knows how to code assembler you're using your your aspect just to say what is your comment
about and and again sorry I love England I used to live here but it's the only country I know so far that has eSports as a university degree what yes you can actually have a university degree in eSports well I'm not exactly sure which I'm it's a degree course in eSports like please comment no comment well I mean if it's if you kind of agree with when you think it's a kind of emergent either emergent form of entertainment which is surely sore then you can also call the sport whether you do or not doesn't really matter but I mean if you if you're arguing about the should it be taught in schools most surely true that some in some form it's here
sport or its culture or it's something in between but you'd already see a lot of sports being taught in schools maybe only feeling as much but especially you u.s. you have a lot of like sports management supports the huge industry there that I was using the hook that Yanni said about us teaching how to use unity or but not teaching how to actually program and be able to create from the it's the same thing that's the point that I wanted to make is that I have nothing against school teaching about eSports but they should be teaching about the whole process of it and how this can in Hayes interactivity and in other aspects instead of just having people there playing games all the time to be a good yeah kind of at least the stuff I've seen done at learn the lower levels like kids are you know 15 to 18 at least two people I know that
do kind of educational work in that space their course are mostly about because the kids are gonna play the games anyway and they're gonna be a big part of their life they're gonna play I don't know let's say moderate six hours day or something and they kind of wanna they know the kids are going to do that so they take the approach of maybe they should also learn some kinds of skills that could add to that kind of in school maybe like time management actually kind of knowing what to go after when you're playing the game and so on I think that's pretty important much as we kind of are learning how to be a good developer learning how to be a good eSport or so on it's kind of someone teaching you kind of those tools that go along with that lifestyle you've chosen and kind of the Euler and PI management and so on all these tools you might need going forward that's pretty good thing to have I think yeah they're all useful tools but you you you you need to start with the basics so and there's no reason
why you can't teach about things like teaching about eSports we're not we're not talking about like college football hey we're going to get guys that maybe aren't so great academics but boy they've throw that all back to the quarterback you know and they go all the way through University I don't think we would want to see that maybe universities do see that as an opportunity in the future we see sports stars coming through colleges can see it happening in the States but they I do worry about just teaching platforms it's like in web development just teaching people how to use Dreamweaver gosh that showing my age Macromedia Dreamweaver you know rather than teaching them the understanding of HTML you know structured markup language you know what why all of that now you know there's the same thing with with with it games development you know if you teach kids you know I sat there and maths you know Euler quaternions first player
perspectives and how you need those angles in player perspective games is like oh yeah effective threes what's this for oh okay context I think context is you know understanding the context of a generation and what what motivates them and protecting that dad's back to that low level is really important so you just essentially describe the gamification or quaternions I didn't know it that's weird Wow sort of kind of say going back to future advice to young developers don't go to location based gaming GPS satellites have a lifespan of eight years and after that they burn up in the atmosphere yep and also blockchain requires a global distributed network so once that's gone and there's only splint earnest remaining yeah not gonna happen yeah yeah also for you're from the UK you'll be using a separate GPS satellite well possibly if we ever
get it built um so yeah that that's the apocalypse for you my my kind of idea behind that kind of driving this vision is maybe to remind you that we shouldn't be pretending that things are okay and we should be focused on growth of our mobile economy and how much money we're gonna make other games there are decisions to be made today even in our business of game development that can affect what I've discussed from not happening unless you really want to go there might be fun so what you what you're saying is we need to be aware of what the environmental situation is that we those existential issues are pertinent even in in making games well they are aren't they we're in a
blockchain connects and and already a few months ago when when the hype train was high on blockchain we heard that mining bitcoins was taking up as much electricity as Ireland yeah except it was all happening in near the coal mines of Mongolia so these these technologies have their physical effect in the environment that we're in and perhaps one thing I mean sure if you're Zynga and in the audience King in the audience or supercell in the audience why not I don't think they can use yes you have the option of building your own solar farm even if not and you just have a server farm maybe as a customer you can just demand that the electricity for that server farm is generated from renewable sources like it's a business decision you can make today oh that's fantastic I'm so glad
you said that because I would say that's the other thing is we've got to say as developers as developer community no we're not we're not going to use tools that and agree to terms of additions that are just blatant they counter healthy for our society yeah I mean I agree in that I think maybe kind of if you don't think only about the environmental factors but also kind of other responsibilities I think a good example has been the all these articles about riot if someone still doesn't really use this thing called Internet haven't seen articles I urge you to go read them they're pretty cringe-worthy I get really really really mad when I read them I get really upset and angry at how kind of all those people can behave in such a way that's like a really good example of how of course that's not only endemic to the kind of games industry in some way I'm not gonna blame all game developers a lot of game universe agree doing really good stuff in that field
but I think yeah these kind of really male dominant companies can also kind of rethink about what they're doing what kind of organizational culture they're fostering also what connect games they design how those reflect on that I think some of the first comments that came out after this riot thing was like oh I'm not surprised like the company is exactly like to play your base basically like toxic as hell was like some of the first comments and then reading all this first-hand encounters that's pretty pretty gruesome stuff so yeah be responsible going on on that line of being responsible I think I will make a comment and you can agree and punch me and do whatever you want to do but what I what I what bothers me gaming industry nowadays is that everybody is talking about making money free-to-play and it is a business and I understand that but
when a company comes and say about doing a game that helps in charities or anything that has a social impact they are even kind of left at they are seniors not profitable nobody wants to work with them nobody thinks that they are serious enough and I think it's about time especially with the power that we have now the financial power and the political power the games have in the world nowadays I think is extremely important that the companies start getting taking responsibility for what they are bringing into society not only taking away from the users taking big data and using the data they want but also using it for a constructive way in society and making it better for everybody and also allowing indie developers to actually go through new routes not trying to be the next big thing but
trying to find and forge new ways of being successful in this business so punch me now go well I Christina throw fish about about this as as the idea of you know acquisition it's so it's so interesting become so Machiavellian and unpleasant it feels toxic but there's no reason why we couldn't as developers publish our own games and okay you know I wanted to talk a bit about epic and you know why they were saying download our game or Android version obviously they ain't gonna get the Apple version off their website but you know why that's they've raised the the specter of of app stores but we were saying what about if developers publish games and said we've got users you've got a game would you like some users and then we take a little bit of money for
that and we go on and on and you say well we make similar games so actually our audiences why can't we share them so why can't we think in ways actually that are more sustainable rather than how on earth do we how do we exploit a group of people you know we do yeah we should have that sense of responsibility so yeah let's let's say that I agree with patty that yeah when the game industry as a whole should be aware of the full scope of what they do and how that influences things the in response to yours I'm trying to keep keep my thoughts together here did a great job the now passing on kaun forgot actually come back yeah all right yeah I mean also a thing you think
when you said this this whole picture sounded like you wanted to make your own app store basically selling user requisitions to the next company and so onwards so so we could could we do something where we we all group together look at the old-fashioned days in folders did it in the UK they did it really well it's called the coop yeah I mean I know there I'm like I'm no expert on on game developers but I know there are some coops especially like in countries like France and other Central European countries and that seems to be a kind of good good way to work mainly I guess those coops mainly work like it's one company where the where all the people kind of want to share of it and then get some kind of equal yeah yeah equal candy yeah now now I remember my point but I found it really kind of curious that over the years and we're still working with the same app stores and of course the curious thing for me
is is that the app stores are built in such a way that you know you don't own your audience you have to win your audience every time time and time again it's not even they just out for app developers even if you're someone who makes music on iTunes how many years have we had iTunes and there's not a single button on iTunes no there never has been where I can just tell the system to notify me when there is a new album from the same artist I don't I can't get a notification if there's a new content from an artist I like every time I mean there are plenty of albums that I've totally missed I didn't know that my favorite artists had made five albums in the last ten years when I wasn't looking but but the same thing for app developers we don't control and the only things that we can do is try to get our Twitter followers or our email lists but the actual notification for new content time and time again we have
to go through the same fuzzy and difficult discovery mechanism instead of having a store that apps actually supports our business and lets us have our user base be automatically notified when we've made something when if they like the thing that we've done before and I find that well disappointing it is disposing it and also that the poor users have got to negotiate when they buy their nice shiny phone because they've ditched their rotting Android phones shame on them that they've got to then agree to terms and conditions oh that's fine yeah we've made them all 47 pages really clear to read in five-point type you know how is that being fair what the user and so the developer can we can we open source business terms where we're getting into the last minutes before I can ask a mum I'm so happy that you guys is to stick around I knew we would go berserk on
this before I get the questions I it's a very simple we try to go well as deep as we can go in 30 minutes because it's a very short time and we could discuss way more than what we did but to try to end in a kind of more uplifting tone bearing in mind your own expertise what do you think what would be the advice that you would give to people to say like what is the immediate thing that people should start thinking now like you're doing your game you're working your business what should you do I froze them I let the others think for a while I'll go to one point which I made in many presentations years past is the fact that we have sports we have eSports they got sports there's so many different sports there's almost something for everyone what to do to watch and so on
there's everything from boxing to ice hockey figure skating like take the big ones and it's like small ones like finish the throw yourself oh and throw your boot carrying your wife I mean these are all kind of some some more or less suspect but if you go to game it's kind of what people think about as eSports it's maybe like trees onerous they're maybe or if you're lucky it's very few games that are kind of considered to be really kind of the the sportif occasion of games so I would also encourage people to kind of think outside the box when the open games maybe maybe you could go into something like more artistic and make that I mean artistic in the sense that the player themselves can kind of express themselves kind of in like figure skating maybe that could be good and could be popular among a certain demographic maybe gives them something new something fun to do something they'll play something you'll then hence get maybe some livelihood from and maybe
something people like to watch so maybe some time to think outside the box rather than create the 500 35th battle royale this year that would be a cool idea this is something I've heard others even smarter than me say lots more than me say a number of times about any game developer any independent game developer at least things get more really formative and defined if you if you're a gaming startup and you go with venture capital and so forth that that looks your future direct trajectory into a very kind of fixed path but if you don't do that if you're actually in D then define your own success the like don't listen to what the others are telling you your success should look like like you I mean essentially as an independent developer what you want to be is profitable and and make the gains that you enjoy and your audience enjoys and you have to be profitable for that
obviously but defining that like what you want out of game development that's I think key yeah II said and yeah there's some great opportunities in eSport I suppose as much as really well beautifully highlighted and I think you know you've got to make games just get out there and bloody make games yes they're gonna be crap games but eventually gonna make a great game and somebody's actually gonna pick up a what are your crap games and go oh that's really cool and so I think the other thing is yeah collaborate keep talk to each other definitely and on Daytona I actually would like to give an advance because just going through what you guys are saying is not only that I know everybody talked about being profitable and making money just remember that in the end is not about getting rich is not necessarily is about getting money enough for you to do your next game that you love and be able to live of what you
love doing I think a lot of the companies nowadays they it's great to aim higher everybody wants to be king and everybody wants to be EA but in the end if you can actually be a company that does the games that you love and leave of it you're more than successful so just keep in mind that sometimes it's better to do what you love and do quality things that you feel proud of than to do the next bedroom royal and and you might make a lot of money out of it but you're not actually improving anything in the business so it's kind of but on that tone you guys do you want to ask anything god several questions yeah I have a question about what is what do you think about games evolving to
eSports example being the four night game it was first game that was not free you had to buy it and in yeah it had a story then couple of years later it became free with better royale mode and hidden lauren in it that is keep above esports and a couple of years laters now they're releasing it gonna release it to the mobiles well yeah I think first of all kind of people have different opinions on what makes a game kind of eSports for me I think I can live with any kind of competitive game being eSports usually if you ask some kind of hard sports eSports person they only think about like the big big names like csgo League of Legends so on the things that have like millions and millions of viewers for example I will count some
the next speedrunning is eSports well but going back to your questions I think it's difficult and I think a lot of companies would like to have that kind of secret blueprint as to how to make a successful eSport game because kind of that gathers a lot of attention of the viewers a lot of players a lot of revenue well I guess what what they did for tonight turned out well I got from what I've heard it was kind of like someone just in house had made like banner else kind of a side thing kind of a small fun mode and then it just they ready when the kind of time was critical to take on a kind of pop G success but of course it's something I think if you are interested in making your game kind of competitive multiplayer and so on I think going towards the eSports route with all the tournaments not a circus know that it can be a good thing to do it just requires a lot of investment both in time and and these days also money because he used to be a time where
you could spend let's say have $100,000 prize pool and I would gather a lot of attention it would be the biggest tournament of the year but these days there's so so much money in there that if you're a small company good luck hi thanks for the interesting talk I have a few questions is that okay well first of I I would like to hear your opinion on the development budget since people keep talking about how expensive it is to develop games and then something like well especially in the triple-a market but then something like help late happens that didn't cost as much but looks just as good so at this point I've been thinking whether or not these games are just miss miss budget or something I mean I would like to hear your opinion on that does anyone
have an opinion on that okay you know yeah any software project can be expensive and you can incur costs because of unknown things that come up you know that's just the way it goes that software they're showbiz but yeah I mean sometimes the games you know triple-a titles they can cost sixty million plus for lots of video because you've got the marketing you've got all of that but yet sometimes isn't it quite freeing just to say let's just sit down we've got the Machine without a write a code we can just make a game and get it out there it's fun there's that but also for hell-blade I don't think they even themselves profile the title exactly as triple-a I mean personally as a one-man team I'm not I mean we're a team of of five or six people but even alone I could make a triple-a title with a scope of half second those lighting screen for
it so so it really is a matter of like yes you can push the visual quality to a certain extent and then make a gameplay around that but so I don't think anything is amiss budget it it's it's really of how they define their scope and how much of a sandbox the world is how expensive or expensive its landscape and so forth I'm gonna gonna defer from answering this because I think you to have much better understanding of the kind of budgeting portions of this please can say that what you mention about software it's also true for flexible construction we take our dear metro extension or our dear finnish nuclear power plant which has been it's now I think the second or most expensive building in the world that's very very impressive yeah I only had want one more okay so something bit more recent I'm not gonna take any side on this but the whole
battlefield 5 and I think you know parent going with this I would like to hear your opinion on how the social media will affect the future of game development and what does that give you old sir can I just ask Chris like I don't know has to bring has to be one or many controversies from but I feel fine just to kind of clarify it you know what I'm talking about I think so what's the one on the marketing guy who said like if you don't like it don't buy it basically people were saying that hey this isn't the battlefield that we were expecting and whatever like that was one of them but I don't I don't remember if there was anything else but you know
yeah well the battlefield 3 fan oh it seriously I'm also a mass of effort so you can imagine how I'm bitching whinging about anthem okay I know I you know I've played battlefield from the start and you know it did hit that point and I think you could probably see where it intersects with with the rise of social media and how the game now has changed so much to reflect trends on social media about I just want to play a game that I really enjoy getting ya know it's I mean we've gone from minecraft to minefield so yeah and I mean it's it's a it's a triple edged sword the so you went on one hand you want to have your loyal fanbase and there are
and there's anecdotal evidence of of studios finding their own fan base which is aligned with their communication and so forth I mean landfill landfill games which one is it yeah I mean I mean yeah so that I mean that they're awesome and it because Omega 4 inch - this totally accurate battle simulator and then cluster truck and these sort of guys I mean that there's there's a fine example of engaging with your community and having in-game tools for an ant which integration that allows people to kind of chime in when when things are happening and when it's like that it's awesome and if you can if your social media manager is so talented that things can end up with that then yes great and then there's the there's the other side of this where where if you fail the expectations of your audience then it
can suddenly become a very very defensive position for you to be in and I have no answer that I'm saying that it's still a minefield and yeah yeah I don't see why developers should have to feel like they've got to justify the idea of having a one-armed lady in a world war 2 situation you know they're you know is it you having to combat things like cultural misappropriation gender equality you know what I'm more worried about is that library that I've just integrated into my codebase gonna gonna play nice it's it is a minefield and I think it's also a distraction as well and when you see very very grand companies like Bioware I can understand why they want to make sure that's happening into an audience but I I would say is is social media the audience it's more it's a virtualization of a group of people there was a comedian that I love
called Boober he actually said something that is brilliant that it goes well with what you said he said that 2 percent of the social media are no no the other way around so 2 percent of the social media are nice people in 98 percent of eso's or something of the Kabaddi but he said but the point was that the people that are verbal are only the even if 98% of the people are nice and the 2 percent are the ones that are actually verbal like constantly are usually the because the people that like the game not always are very they like something they don't always criticize openly but the people that hate it are very Auto about everything so it's hard to judge based on that because you know it's not the whole the full scope is only the very loud people
that are talking but we do have to feel already exploited everything again like the last panel of every day is like an hour and nobody goes away so it's kind of fun but before we go I had the only one cut from all of you that were here how many of you work in game developers or indie developer interested in game development before you came to this panel heads up how many of us do you want to make games or if we broke one or two they're gonna be fine that's the expect will be provided after the service so guys thank you very much max I hope we didn't scare you too much great it was great guys thank you very much [Applause] [Music]
The modern game development landscape is defined by a precarious tension between rapid technological advancement and systemic instability. Rising user acquisition costs and extreme market saturation have made discoverability a primary hurdle for studios. While asset stores and high-level development tools have increased productivity, they have simultaneously fostered a dangerous dependency on third-party ecosystems. This reliance risks long-term sustainability, particularly as developers face potential shifts in hardware capabilities and energy availability. To mitigate these threats, the industry must pivot toward portability, open-source infrastructure, and the cultivation of direct, resilient relationships with player communities.
Technical proficiency remains a cornerstone of long-term success, with a clear mandate for developers to master low-level programming fundamentals rather than relying exclusively on high-level engines. Beyond the technical realm, the industry faces a moral imperative to address its environmental footprint, toxic workplace cultures, and the exploitative nature of current app store distribution models. There is a growing call for alternative business structures, such as cooperatives, that prioritize social impact and sustainable growth over the prevailing data-extractive, profit-first paradigms.
For independent creators, the path forward lies in prioritizing creative passion and niche market exploration over the pursuit of fleeting trends like battle royale titles. While eSports offer significant potential, the high barrier to entry and intense competition necessitate substantial investment. Furthermore, developers must navigate the digital landscape with caution, particularly regarding social media engagement. Because online discourse is frequently dominated by a vocal minority, it serves as an unreliable metric for overall player sentiment. By focusing on high-quality gameplay and authentic community building, developers can better insulate themselves from the volatility of the broader market and the distortions of public feedback.
PocketGamer.biz · 2018