Industry trade shows can be the suck.

It doesn’t even matter what industry you are in: gaming, restaurant equipment, international espionage, or office supplies.

Get 45 people into a warm room. Add poor air circulation, surreal lighting most often seen on planet Ziblix, pour in a monotone speaker on a well-known topic, add ten buzzwords per minute… and just count backwards from 100. The effect is roughly the same as administering a surgical anaesthetic. Within 20 seconds, you could probably remove a kidney from the guy in front of you and he wouldn’t wake up. In fact, I funded my last two trade shows by harvesting organs from unsuspecting panel attendees. Sorry about that, RadarX. You really can function as well with one.

I have to say that ION is the first game conference in which I didn’t have trouble keeping my eyes open. I yawned twice in one of the legal presentations, but that had a lot more to do with an overabundance of SOE generosity, wine and 4am than with the speakers.

ION, in case you missed my last commentary, is the online gaming industry conference formerly known as OGDC. Set in Seattle this year, running from May 13-15, it was one of the most informative events I’ve been to. You’ll be hearing more about who I talked to about what both here and on the site that hired me to attend, MPOGD.com.

For today though, I just want to say that it was good, and well worth the price of admission ($695 US) for anyone who actually works in the game industry, or wants to. There were no real “how to build a game” sessions – after this long, the basics are well known to most and you can just go buy a book on Amazon.

What I really enjoyed about ION was the emphasis on new challenges that have not been analyzed to death yet:
- legal issues rising from the morass and now looming over games (particularly persistent, online games). You might think lawyer talk is dull, but that is not the case when they present facts and even speculation on how our beloved games may be dragged into court by disgruntled players and government agencies. It is both exciting and scary.
- community development. Games are the social environ we are starting to move toward more and more, abandoning the old standbys of bridge clubs, bowling alleys and ~gasp~ even pubs. How community is handled, internally and externally, is a growing area within game companies.
- “monetization”, a term I hate… but plenty of great stuff to talk about. RMT (real money transactions), subscriptions, microtransactions, free-to-play, gold sellers; the gaming industry is big business, and there are a hundred different ways to make a living at it. Many existing companies are looking at experimenting with new revenue models, and for the new titles, there is nothing to lose by taking on a “ridiculous” or “unheard of” path to profits.

In summary, the times are changing, and not over the course of decades, but by the minute.
Hello Kitty Online could well be the WoW-killer. Do not laugh, unbeliever; stranger things are happening in the game industry, right under our modems.