I took fewer notes on the sessions I attended the last two days of Casuality. There were more panels and fewer individual speakers, and the panelists in general were giving out less chunky data nuggets (and more soft opinions) than the individual speakers. Here’s some stuff I did note down: (From various speakers and various sessions – I don’t remember in all cases who said what)

Mobile:

Other:

I’ve been going to GDC most years since 1995, and the quality of the shwag (free stuff) there has fallen from mediocre (free t-shirts, decent parties with cold-plate appetizers and beer) to almost non-existent (t-shirts that you have to compete for or stand in a 20 minute line for).

Casuality is a much smaller conference, and perhaps that’s the reason the shwag there is vastly better than GDC.

Most of the vendors/publishers with tables set up (~10 or so) were pushing free t-shirts or something comparable – almost throwing them at you. Trying to control the volume of stuff I was carrying around made me pretty selective though. There were also frisbees and other goodies.

I only went to one party – the PopCap party. About 200 people were there, and it was nice – excellent appetizers, open bar (fancy drinks, not just beer), and a gift bag for each attendee with about $50 of assorted free stuff.

But I missed the party with the best shwag – by Oberon. At Oberon’s party, they gave away a free Mini-Cooper (yes, the ~$20,000 car). There were apparently about 250 people at the party, so the cost to Oberon of that one party favor was almost $100/guest.

I flew into Seattle yesterday for the Casuality conference – the main U.S. conference focused on casual game development. Some impressions:

Industry Size/RealArcade Size
The first interesting data points came not at the conference, but in an article about the conference in the local paper (Seattle Post-Intelligencer – more articles here and here) that I read in the cab on the way over. The article quotes a DFC analyst saying the U.S. casual games market will grow from $314 million in ’05 to $458 million in ’06. That’s on the high side of other estimates I’ve heard, and shows really strong growth.

Also in the article is the factoid that Real Network’s Q1 revenues from games were $18.6 million. If we annualize Real’s game revenue and assume a bit of growth for this year, we get to about $85 million for Real’s ’06 games revenue. But, according to Real, Europe accounts for ~25% of their revenue, and they have an Asian presence, too. So, let’s say only 70% of their revenue is U.S. That’s about $50 million for ’06, or about a 12% market share, if the DFC analyst is right. My general impression is that Real is even more dominant than that in the U.S. downloadable space – perhaps 25%+ market share, so I’d guess either the DFC analyst is overly optimistic with his overall revenue estimates, or that his industry definition is broad (i.e., including mobile games).

Initial Show Impressions
The show itself is in downtown Seattle, at the home theatre of the Seattle Symphony, which apparently does a side-business in conferences during the week. The main speaker for each time slot spoke in the concert hall – it was a very different vibe from the typical convention held in a utilitarian convention hall or hotel.

I had been expecting as many as 1,000 people at the show, but my eyeball guesstimate was lower – maybe 400-500 people. Seattle is the home of a number of casual game companies (Real/Gamehouse, BigFish, PopCap, and others), and each of the biggies seemed to have about 50 people at the show, so there was sort of a lopsided representation of just these few companies.

I arrived during lunch break, and fortunately stumbled into a crew of regular posters from the IndieGamer forums, mostly smaller indies, so I felt a bit connected right from the start.

After years of seeing GDC grow to massive size, it was nice to be at a conference small enough where I recognized a fairly high percentage of names on the name tags (even though of course I’m terrible with faces, even for those who I have seen in person before). There was the usual bit of wandering around the main gathering area, squinting at people’s name tags without trying to be too obvious about it (’cause in some cases it might be a person I really should recognize by face and not just by name tag…)

Sessions
The first session after lunch was given by Rob Glaser, CEO of RealNetworks. Some data points he gave:

Next session was “Beyond the 60th minute” – a game design panel with Jason Kapalka of PopCap, and a guy from GameLab, and a guy who designed Tradewinds 2 and Tradewinds Legends (sorry – missed those names)

Mostly a bit ‘touchy/feely’ – not so many hard data points so I didn’t take as many notes, but here’s a couple:

This session spilled over into a production session that I only caught the beginning of (had to leave for a meeting). Most meaningful data point:

I went to one last session – a ‘State of the Industry’ panel with the honchos from many of the major players (PopCap, Microsoft, Pogo, BigFish, Real, Boonty, IIRC) It was an interesting panel, but again, rather ‘touchy feely’, and I didn’t write down any real data nuggets/notes from the panel.

That’s it for today – I went to the PopCap party after the show and had a good time, but retired early (woke up at 6 am CST, 4 am Seattle time. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have more on the show itself, and perhaps some of the more interesting (and non-confidential) water-cooler talk.

Following last week’s announcement that Bill Gates is (slowly) retiring from Microsoft to focus on his foundation, comes news that Warren Buffett is giving away about 85% of his net worth (roughly $37 billion at current prices) to charity.

That’s cool, and slightly newsworthy (he had originally planned to donate his fortune upon his death, not earlier).

But what’s really interesting is that he’s giving 5/6 of the money to:

Bill and Melinda Gates’ Foundation.

I’ve followed a bit of what the Gates Foundation is doing, and I’m pretty impressed. Obviously, Buffett is, too. Most super-rich in Buffett’s position would want to form their own foundation, with their own name, for ego purposes. That Buffett is willing and able to put his money into someone else’s foundation is cool. And pretty smart too. Buffett is 75, Bill Gates is 50 – Buffett obviously trusts that Bill (and Melinda) will be solid managers long after he is gone.

Bravo Mr. Buffett.

(Original Slashdot blurb, which linked to longer CNN story)

I just installed a trial version of Visual Studio 2005 (I had been using the previous version, 2003).

Theoretically, new compilers can provide the following advantages (that are significant to me, anyways):

1) Better interface/tools
2) Faster compiles
3) Smaller compiles
4) Faster code

Item 1 will take a while to evaluate – I’ll use the new compiler for a few weeks and see what I think. But 2-4 are fairly easy to test. I tested all of the following on my current game, which is fairly similar in scope to Bonnie’s Bookstore.

Compile Time (Full Solution Rebuild):
__________Debug_____Release
VS 2003_____:20_________:30
VS 2005_____:26_________:34

Compile size, KB (Release Mode Only)
_________Game_EXE________DLL____Total ____Total (zipped)
VS 2003_______988________340_____1328_______574
VS 2005_____1,016________612_____1628_______717

Code Speed (Release mode - milliseconds to do 30 passes through my main draw loop, EXCLUDING the blit to the video card)

VS 2003___335*
VS 2005___358*


*These are averages of 10 attempts on each version, and there was significant variability between tests, with a range of 287-375 for the VS 2003 version, and 299-396 for the VS 2005 version. Also, I didn’t hand tweak the optimization parameters for VS 2005, but left them as they were imported from my VS 2003 project. Possibly, more tweaking would improve the 2005 results.

All tests on my main dev box, with a dual-core AMD 4600+ CPU.

I’m surprised that the build time got noticeably slower in 2005 – In theory, the new compiler will use both cores for compiles, which should nearly double the compile speed. Perhaps I don’t have the option properly enabled, but I looked for info on it and couldn’t find any way to explicitly enable or test that feature.

Compiled size is another minor drawback. Since my games are built for download, I like to keep the EXE (and accompanying DLL – i.e. MSVCR71.DLL or MSVCR80.DLL) small. This isn’t a huge issue, since, with graphics and sound, the download will likely be in the 13 MB range. Still, it’s a minor consideration, and perhaps more important for those shooting for very small download sizes. (When I did the Active X version of Bonnie’s Bookstore, I was targeting an 800KB initial download, with further data streamed. OTOH, that version used a static version of the C run-time, and given that most of the extra bulk is in the run-time DLL, the issue may not be THAT severe)

Finally, VS 2005 apparently produces slower code than VS 2003, though possibly the results are just due to noise/variability.

Overall, the raw specs of 2005 look inferior to 2003. Still, if the new version enables me to be noticeably more productive, that will dwarf the comparitively small differences in the above metrics. Hopefully I’ll post an update in the future on the interface differences/improvements.

======================

Edit: I just spent a bit more time playing with the various code optimizations in VS 2005, and now I’ve got the performance to where the draw loop executes about 5-6% faster than in VS 2003, at a cost of slowing down the release mode full rebuild from 34 seconds to 50 seconds, and increasing the file size a bit (from 1016 KB to 1048 KB).