The Digital Distribution Summit
I had the opportunity to attend Film Victoria’s Digital Distribution Summit yesterday. The goal of the Summit was to highlight & address the slow shift in games distribution from the traditional retail model, into a model powered by digital downloads (such as the iPhone’s App Store, Xbox Live Arcade/Indie Games, Playstation Network & Wii/DSi Ware), hopefully giving Independent games developers the knowledge they need to be able to meet the challenges of publishing games in this new climate.
Overall the day was quite interesting – the main speakers provided a great variety of perspectives – covering the gamut from what an aspiring indie games developer should to in setting up their company, to what you need to be ware of when creating a pitch document for submitting a game to the console platforms (Xbox Live Arcade/PSN/WiiWare), as well as how best to be heard in a slowly crowding space.
For me personally – the biggest message I got from the day (at least in relation to my own work on getting Meteor Swarm out the door) is the importance on starting your marketing campaign as early as possible. This is something I’ve obviously not done well – I’ve pushed out trailers earlier on, but having been switching between working on that and Eventbook, I’ve not followed up with additional ones as time permitted.
The other thing I took away from the day was the importance of building community. Whilst I’ve been doing bits and pieces via my own Twitter account over the last few months of Meteor Swarm’s development (throwing screenshots of UI work for feedback in particular), I’ve actually not done a great deal to build a community around it.
On the flip side, it’s good to see those areas whilst I still have some time remaining on the project – aspects which I can finish off to ensure I have a better chance within the smaller Xbox Live Indie Games market. It also justifies some of my decisions – planning to release the PC version of the codebase as well, at least once I’ve completed the necessary UI tweaks and adjustments to make it more suited to the platform.
One thing I do have to say for the organisation of the event though – the fact that it was live streamed out for those who were unable to attend was a bonus, as this now means that the recorded video will be made available to download for everyone from the site in the near future. The best thing to do for now is to watch their site (or their Twitter feed) for when this will happen.
This does mean that it’s probably not worth me putting up my set of notes from the day up. If anyone is interested – best to leave a comment or drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do.