For this month’s featured video, we focus on the technology side of game development with the Samsung Developer Conference 2018 and the event’s Opening Keynote with President & CEO, DJ Koh.
Here’s what Mr. Koh had to say about the Internet of Things (IoT) and game development. Much more is included in the nearly two hour presentation, so buckle up and enjoy:
Whether you are an event coordinator, press, or general attendee, if you have an event video to share with us, please let us know and we’ll be happy to feature it.
When I think of air combat games, I still hear the Afterburner game soundtrack in my head. Now, Sega’s Afterburner is an old-school arcade game from the heyday of arcade gaming in the late 80s, and combat aircraft gaming has come a long way since then. Will Ace Combat 7 make as deep an impression for current-gen gamers as a 16-bit arcade game did for me years ago? We’ll give our impressions following a demo day event for the seventh iteration of Bandai Namco’s franchise air fighter.
The Event
San Francisco, frequently visited by the Blue Angels flight team and home to soaring hotel suites with a view, was the location for the Ace Combat 7 demo. While the Blue Angels weren’t part of this day, a 45-foot floor Hilton hotel suite overlooking a scenic skyline was the venue. The room with a view struck me as a good choice for a location given the type of game being demoed.
High-flying demo room (photo credit: E4G)
In the demo area, past the check-in area, rows of PlayStation 4 systems, controllers, monitors, and headphones, all facing out toward that aforementioned view. Off in its own set-aside space was a couple PlayStation VR (PSVR) demo stations for the exclusive version of Ace Combat 7. Behind the stations, a spread of snacks and drinks was laid out to keep media folks recharged while going through the Ace Combat 7 modes and stations.
The Game
PlayStation 4: Ace Combat 7, just over a month ahead of launch, was shown off with a free-for-all deathmatch and team deathmatch multiplayer in F16C fighters, along with three missions that led up to a boss encounter.
In the multiplayer encounters, it’s simply not as easy to score kills versus unpredictable human players as it is against the computer opponents. While I did not rank high offensively with aircraft missiles and guns, which is the best way to earn points, I was able to avoid getting killed by human opponents. It’s easy enough to evade enemies, by dropping chaff, pulling a wild maneuver to avoid the missile, or even dipping into the cloud cover. when going on the offensive, especially against skilled opponents. The closer I was the better my odds of scoring a hit, whether with guns or missiles. Avoiding a missile at some distance is easy because there’s usually enough warning of a missile zeroing on an aircraft.
In a round of 4 vs. 4 team fighting, I was able to be evasive enough to keep one or two fighters chasing me down without a kill, while my teammates worked on the other opponents. Sometimes, in a team deathmatch, it works well enough to play the bait.
The match areas can be over calm and flat terrain — or at night, in a windy storm, in treacherous terrain that can take you out as easily as a missile barrage, all of which play a role in the risks the player faces from the environment and how match strategy versus other players will unfold.
The single-player mode felt almost leisurely by comparison, with extensive cutscenes leading into missions, and between the missions. Using these cut-scenes, players immerse themselves into an emerging pseudonymous Eurasian battlefront, comprised of real aircraft but fictitious personas and organizations.
That said, players are dropped into the role of ambitious rookie Trigger of Mage Squadron, an Osean fighter matched against the surging air-land-see Erusean forces. As your squadron teammates will often remind you, especially in the early stages that also serve as a tutorial, that you are not a one-person army. They do a fair job both congratulating and humbling the player.
Speaking of tutorials, if you’re not experienced with Ace Combat-style gameplay, the single player tutorial does a very good job getting you up to speed with manageable instructions and missions, to get familiar with instrumentation, weapons, changing views, and more.
Ace Combat is a feast for the eyes, as some scenes of the sky, land, and sea scenes will look like art, and nearly suspend disbelief that one is looking at just computer-rendered imagery in motion. Water streaks on the airplane canopy in the clouds, the fog is not just a haze but a varied mixture of visibility at high speed. Mountains are deeply textured and complex, assuming, as a player, you don’t collide into it if you look for more than a long second.
As beautiful as the PlayStation 4 version is, I’d expect the PC version to be even sharper and more vivid, if this NVIDIA video of the company’s application of their sampling tech in the PC version of the game is any sign of what’s coming.
Dogfighting in Ace Combat 7 (photo credit: Bandai Namco)
The music in the demo was adequate but not very memorable, although it accompanies the game, and particularly the cutscenes, reasonably well. The sound effects, though, were more gripping and meaningful to pay notice to anyway, since I had to pay attention to the sound of missile locks, jet engines, and other notifications.
PSVR missions: Ace Combat 7’s virtual reality missions are a stripped down form of the basic structure of Ace Combat, with three missions to experience a taste of the game in virtual reality and a bonus hangar and air show mode, for different ways of seeing aircraft on the ground and in the air.
I played through a mission, which was long enough to get used to looking around the aircraft, outside the canopy. Every motion using a joystick, or even a Thrustmaster you make is reflected in your pilot’s hands.
The PSVR version offered a more basic storyline, a lower visual fidelity, but effectively maintains the sense of speed, audio even a feeling of G-forces at work. For a moment I had visions of haptic pressure effects to simulate the G-Force partnered with this VR experience. The virtual reality goggles, which in some cases might seem isolating, actually feels like the perfect fit for this game. It’s immersive as heck to ascend to the cloud deck in pursuit of an enemy fighter, physically looking around and seeing — same as the non-VR version — moisture droplets streaming over your canopy as visibility drops into a murk of blue sky and clouds, and then hearing the roar of engines as the opposing fighter turns, jets roaring in the passage, overhead. It’s the definition of short but sweet. Hopefully, more content may come down the pipeline for this iteration of Ace Combat 7.
My take after giving the game a couple hours of playtime is that Ace Combat 7 is it is a strong entry in a well-established franchise that effectively balances fast aerial action, and solid story-telling in the single-player mode and fun multiplayer modes. The PSVR content for Ace Combat 7, even while greatly simplified in content, was arguably the more immersive and intense experience, amplified by the weather effects, sound effects and sense of flight speed in virtual reality.
For another glimpse at Ace Combat 7, Bandai Namco released two new trailers:
The A-10C in Ace Combat 7 (YouTube)
MiG-31B in Ace Combat 7 (YouTube)
Ace Combat 7 will take flight on PS4, PSVR, and Xbox One on January 18th and PC via Steam on February 1st, 2019.
San Francisco – December 11, 2018 – Organizers of the 19th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards, the premier accolades for peer recognition celebrating the industry’s top games, studios and developers, will be honoring esteemed writer and director Amy Hennig with the Lifetime Achievement Award. The Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony takes place on Wednesday, March 20, 2019 at 6:30pm at the San Francisco Moscone Center during the 2019 Game Developers Conference, and in conjunction with the Independent Games Festival (IGF). The ceremonies are available to attend for all GDC 2019 pass-holders.
Over the course of more than three decades, Amy has established a multifaceted career in game development, starting with development on the Atari 7800 up to the modern PlayStation 4 platform. Amy’s expertise is as deep as it is varied, with professional experience as a digital artist, animator, game designer and especially in the last two decades, as a writer and director of acclaimed adventure titles with strong narrative and character elements.
Serving as the creative director and writer of Naughty Dog’s Uncharted game series, her contributions helped that series become one of the most acclaimed and beloved in the modern gaming era. Before that, Amy served as writer and director of the groundbreaking Soul Reaver / Legacy of Kain series at Crystal Dynamics during her more than eight year tenure with the company. Amy has earned countless accolades for her writing from prestigious organizations including the WGA Videogame Writing Awards and BAFTA, the latter of which also rewarded Amy with a Special Award in recognition for her contribution to the video game industry.
“Amy Hennig is a powerful figure in the game world; her work exemplifies what good game narrative can be, with pathos, humor, suspense and energy. She is truly one of the most influential developers in the games industry,” said Katie Stern, general manager of the Game Developers Conference. “These past accomplishments are just milestones in a career that we’ll be following for years to come, but for one night at the GDCAs, we’ll reflect on the hard work and artistry that makes game developers like Amy the heart of the industry.”
Previous recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award recipients include Tim Schafer, Tim Sweeney, Shigeru Miyamoto, Warren Spector, John Carmack, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Hideo Kojima, Sid Meier, Ken Kutaragi, Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk and Peter Molyneux, among others.
The recipients of the Lifetime Achievement are chosen by the Game Developers Choice Special Awards Jury, which includes notable game industry leaders such as Chris Charla (ID@Xbox), Laine Nooney (New York University), Brian Reynolds (Big Huge Games), Brandon Sheffield (Necrosoft Games) and Mare Sheppard (Metanet Software).
For more information about the 19th annual Game Developers Choice Awards, visit: http://www.gamechoiceawards.com/. For more details on the Game Developers Conference, please visit the GDC’s official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS. Official photos are available via the Official GDC Flickr account: www.flickr.com/photos/officialgdc/. Both the Game Developers Choice Awards and IGF ceremonies are available to attend for all GDC 2019 pass-holders.
Facebook is invested in their augmented reality-for-all platform, Spark AR, as evidenced by their recent event schedule to discuss it more in-depth. Robert Shearer Director of Silicon Architecture and Modeling at the Menlo Park-headquartered Facebook led a keynote at the inaugural RISC-V open source silicon-oriented conference in — of course — Silicon Valley.
Facebook’s Robert Shearer keynotes at RISC-V Summit (photo credit: E4G)
Before discussing what was coming up next, Shearer first waxed wistful about the old days of the Commodore 64 era computing whose core experience was about enabling its users with the superpower of creating new and immersive experiences. Since then, PCs and other devices have matured into different form factors and screens. Pivoting to a familiar descriptor of augmented reality, as a delivery vehicle for “superpowers,” Shearer emphasized, “We’re on the cusp of a complete reinvention of a computer interface.”
Going back to the Commodore 64 era, Shearer discussed how he had a new superpower to create new and immersive worlds. PCs have come a long way since then, and with them about as many types of screens. Introducing augmented reality (AR), Shearer aimed for a high disruptive bar: “We’re on the cusp of a complete reinvention of a computer interface. We believe the next generation is augmented reality” Like the retro computers of old, augmented reality-style superpowers, through wearables, might include increasing human cognition or memory, using glasses to recognize someone and remind you of their name, and selectively muting background noise at a bar or background noise at a bar or restaurant. It’s worth noting that correlating augmented reality with superpowers has long been a key part of the branding of the AR-oriented Augmented World Expo, so the idea is not new although the capabilities of AR certainly has.
With more conventional modes of interaction, though, Shearer cautioned, “a little bit of the connection (between people and experiences) dies. However, with the help of hopefully stylish AR glasses, it might blur the line between a computer interface most people may be comfortable using.
Virtual reality, Shearer believes, will be the “super immersive environment,” while perfecting an augmented reality experience is the long-term objective that should be reached. however, to get there it might take as long as 15 years from now. What it will take to reach that point is improving the fundamental capabilities of the silicon baked into augmented reality.
How many of the one billion virtual reality users Facebook CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg quipped about as his vision for the technology at the Oculus Connect 5 conference will happen to be augmented reality users is certainly an open question.
Challenges of AR Silicon
Humans are used to living in a rich audio and visual; world, with natural day-to-day haptics, a package deal without latency. That’s how we define reality, Robert Shearer asserted. To get to a point where augmented reality can approximate it will require more than current-gen off-the-shelf silicon.
Robert Shearer discusses the specific challenges of AR and silicon (photo credit: E4G)
“Our appetite (for improved augmented reality experiences) is growing so much faster, so we have to build the silicon to give people the world they’re asking for,” Shearer said. To achieve that blurring of the line in reality between hardware, software, and human perception of reality, it would require a 100x factor of performance improvement from the silicon. In Shearer’s experience, it would require going back to the basics to re-architect what silicon can do.
“We have to understand the thermals, the plastics, the hinge. We have to get deeply engaged with the software team … and the users,” Shearer urged the silicon design and engineer-heavy audience.
Including optics, the discussion mentioned that the new optics, which has “the optics guys … extremely excited,” also means redesigning the silicon to run the displays and manage the optics. The latency requirements mean having to consider distributed computing in the designs. Distributed computing would division of different computation tasks across many different systems, to process the data more effectively to make high-quality, low-latency augmented reality possible.
Audio, too, serves an important role in creating immersive augmented reality. “Audio is such an incredibly important part of our immersive experience” If the audio is out of sync, creating latency, it can damage the immersion To reach peak audio immersion in AR, as with other aspects, massive compute will be required to get there.
Interaction in AR, complete with responsive touch and ditching anything “click”-related is hard to do, but is another necessary hurdle to surmount to reach optimal AR interaction. User interface, Shearer added, requires far more than “slapping 2D (content) on a wall”. Computer vision, which allows AR to “see” the world around the device will likely still need cameras to recreate visual perception and recreate 3D models.
What talk about AR would be complete without including artificial intelligence (AI)? This keynote was no exception. Mapping space, processing audio and streamlining processes with both software and hardware systems can be accomplished with AI. As many articles, such as this one posted on Forbes, have noted, AI technology is evolving quickly with a lot of room to grow. AR and AI are technologies that are likely to evolve and mature together.
In the end, though, returning to the theme woven through the keynote, Shearer reminded the audience that this potential requires a re-thinking of silicon system design, creating a tightly integrated system from every aspect.
“We need your help. We need dozens of customized cores,” the Facebook veteran proclaimed. Getting FPGA (field-programmable gate array) silicon on developers desks, early developer environments, in the hands of AR developers early on, to help developers utilize every ounce of the power every new advancement in hardware and software, will help too.
Robert Shearer finished his entreaty where it began: with a big picture call to action. He portrayed AR as not a toy, not a fantasy, the next generation of computer interaction. “Let’s redefine the world,” Robert Shearer proclaimed. That should naturally include virtual worlds. The notion of ever-improving superpowers is a natural fit for games — presumably in augmented reality — and will likely lead the way in demonstrating the capabilities of what next-gen augmented reality in the next 15 years could be capable of.
The twelve-years-running global game development conference series, Casual Connect, has been acquired by creative content development shop, Greenlit Content. Casual Connect founder Jessica Tams and her events team will join the Greenlit Content team, overseeing the event series she founded and led. With events held in the major game development hubs around the globe, such a Seattle, San Francisco, Singapore, and other locales, bringing in thousands of attendees and hundreds of indie developer entries for the Indie Prize, Casual Connect seems like it should be a good fit for an expanded games content network.
Additionally, the media portion of Casual Connect, Gamesauce, will be merged into the Greenlit Content-owned Gamedaily.biz editorial family. Greenlit Content claims an editorial reach of over 90 million through its network of owned sites and partner outlets.
From the Gamedaily.biz article about the acquisition, the CEO and founder of Greenlit Content shared his thoughts about the acquisition:
“I’ve followed the Casual Connect event series for more than a decade, and I’ve been extremely impressed by its international expansion,” said John Benyamine, CEO and co-founder of Greenlit Content. “Having Jessica and Casual Connect join with Greenlit Content is truly an honor. This is huge for Greenlit’s global expansion efforts. Both Casual Connect and the industry have been evolving quickly. We feel that we have an incredible opportunity to define what an event series really looks like in 2019 for the games industry.”
From the same article, Jessica Tams, the founder of Casual Connect added her thoughts on the role of events in the game industry and the acquisition:
“Events are more than just what happens at the event,” she said. “Those looking to come into the industry use the past Casual Connect lectures (available on YouTube) and articles to make business decisions and train new employees. With the expanded reach of Greenlit, we hope to be able to bring our new and existing content to a wider audience.”
In 2019, according to Gamedaily.biz, expect a rebranding of the Casual Connect event series, new events, and other expansion plans. Events for Gamers will keep an eye out for all the details as they become available.
London, 6 December 2018 – Company of Heroes 2, developed by Relic Entertainment and published by SEGA Europe, celebrated its fifth birthday in 2018. We’ve been marking the occasion with various streams, updates, and community events, and wanted to end the year with a huge COH2 game giveaway, and our largest tournament in the title’s history!
From December 6th at 10AM PT until December 10th at 10AM PT, players who have yet to dive in to this critically acclaimed World War 2 real-time strategy game can do so for free! Anyone who logs on to Steam during this period can add the Company of Heroes 2 base game to their library, and it’s theirs to keep after the promotion ends. This is the perfect opportunity for new players to experience a fantastic single-player campaign, epic Theatre of War scenarios, and of course spectacular multiplayer battles throughout a variety of historical WW2 locations. To all the fans out there already playing Company of Heroes 2, make sure to spread the word to your friends, and recruit some new soldiers to fight on your side!
As well as the Company of Heroes 2 5th Anniversary Giveaway, Relic Entertainment and SEGA Europe are proud to present the finals of the Anniversary Classic, a massive tournament featuring some of the best COH2 players from all over the world battling head to head for a prize pool of over $20,000 USD!
Top level COH2 teams have been duking it out in qualifying rounds over the past few months, and it all comes to a head as the eight remaining teams go to battle for glory (and spoils of war) in the Grand Finals on December 8th & 9th. COH2 community casting legends A_E and Stormless will be covering the action from a studio in Manchester, and fans can watch the action unfold live on Twitch at twitch.tv/relicentertainment. Keep an eye on the Company of Heroes 2 Twitter account for more details!
Whether you’re a new recruit or a battle-hardened veteran, now’s the perfect time to join the ranks of one of the greatest WWII strategy franchises of all time!
STEM — an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics — is a term that gets more visibility in popular media, due to a call to arms in improving interest in this spectrum of education because of the shift in the workplace toward digital careers. What tools and concepts can be applied to increase interest in STEM? A recent Forbes story highlights one possible answer through the juxtaposition between STEM education and a do-it-yourself maker community, at least in the United States:
Today, more than 46% of Americans (135 million people) identify as being part of the maker community, both young and old.
That brings us to Piper, one of the better-known companies invested in teaching STEM concepts to a range of audiences, especially in group environments such as classrooms. Taken a step further, Piper kits and others like it could also be a neat fit for events like hackathons as well.
Through an interview with Dr. Joel Sadler, CTO and Founder of Piper, we get insight into the company and its platform, their audience and how their hardware might fit into different events.
Events for Gamers: Joel, to start with can you briefly share Piper’s journey with Events for Gamers’ readers?
Dr. Joel Sadler: Early childhood experiences of creating whimsical contraptions with electronic LEGO blocks turned into a lifelong learning path of engineering at MIT and Stanford, leading me to build three technology startups along the way. Piper was founded in 2014 with the mission to empower future generations of engineers through technology-driven play that combines physical, electrical and software building with games kids love like Minecraft: Pi Edition. Since its inception, Piper has inspired thousands of kids to build their first computer and to see computers not just as a magical black-box, but as an available tool for creative self-expression and problem-solving.
Dr Joel Sadler headshot (photo credit: Piper)
By raising $2.1 million in seed funding, we were able to kickstart Piper’s vision to spark every child’s inner inventor. Piper’s first product, a DIY computer kit, inspired creative confidence and empowerment by seamlessly transforming kids’ passive technology consumption to active learning through our game-based platform. Last year we announced our Series A funding which enabled Piper to build and expand its ecosystem of products which allow children of all ages to develop their STEM skills continually.
E4G:In terms of individual customer and institutional adoption, what’s the current reach for Piper?
Joel: To date over 100,000 kids have built their own Piper Computer. In schools, we are currently piloting the Piper as a next generation learning experience in over 600 schools across the U.S.A.
E4G: Are you seeing interest in or market success outside North America for Piper?
Joel: Absolutely. We have had orders for Piper computer kits in over 80 countries, and we think our approach is universally relevant to a more significant global need to revolutionize technology education for kids. The process of physical building is a universal language regardless of country, spoken-language or socioeconomic background. Lego blocks look the same irrespective of where you come from, and Piper is the new generation of universal digital/physical lego blocks.
E4G: There’s been some discussion online about whether Piper is fully open source, from software to blueprints. What is the open source status for Piper?
Joel:Right now it’s a mixture of open and closed source tools, and we are working on making as much available as possible. The Minecraft: Pi Edition is a core part of our user experience and is this a Creative Commons version of Minecraft designed explicitly for the Raspberry Pi. It is open for the community to add user-generated user-generated scripts for custom game logic. We used this flexibility to build in our own stories and adventures on the Raspberry Pi in order- to teach about computers electronics and programming. We welcome the community to make their modifications, and we’d love to hear about them, too. Right now it’s a mixture of open and closed source tools, and we are working on making as much available as possible.
E4G: While you have Minecraft as part of the Piper system, are you working with other game developers to expand the games, sandboxes or interactive experiences on the platform that the target audience can use to learn from?
Joel: We love working with sandbox systems like Minecraft: Pi Edition and we are constantly working with game designers and programmers to add new episodes and stories to the kit. The Piper Kits connect to WiFi so are updated over the air with new content as we build it. Also since the Piper is based on the Raspberry Pi Linux-based operating system – the sky is the limit on what software you can add on there. For example, we recently added a custom version of Google Blockly to the Piper Kit called PiperCode so kids can program physical circuits with a drag and drop interface.
E4G: What’s the most interesting project a user has created with the Piper Computer Kit?
Joel: I loved seeing one kid who wanted to redesign the Piper – using free 3D CAD modeling software, and a 3D printer at his school, to improve the enclosure of the Piper by adding in an articulating handle so he could carry it around like a lunch box. I also especially like seeing kids building other smart devices they commonly interact with. For example, we saw kids making their own Amazon Alexa systems by adding in a USB microphone and using some openly available virtual assistant software – all running on a Piper box.
E4G: There’s growing competition in the STEM-focused teaching computer kit marketplace. How does Piper differentiate itself from the other players in the space?
Joel: We really focus on exposing building, electronics, and programming together, rather than as separate things. We have found that kids are more engaged when we fuse a variety of approaches together at the same time – and always having a real hand-on building component. For example, using games like Minecraft:Pi Edition to simultaneously give instruction about how to electrically wire up a circuit has been a successful technique for us in keeping kids engaged. Our building experience is as close as possible to real things engineers do every day. It’s a challenging but rewarding building experience with real nuts, bolts, and hinges fused with off the shelf electronics like breadboards and LEDs. We don’t sugar coat any of the parts because we want kids to see the real way things work in their rawest form – while still keeping things fun with a game-based layer. The skills kids pick up after building a Piper kit feed directly into building real things and that is something we wish we would see more companies doing.
We’re excited to be presenting yet another great list of upcoming industry events! To help you discover upcoming game industry conferences, conventions, festivals and other events, we post a consolidated list here on Events for Gamers each month.
View the complete December event list below. You can also click here for the main calendar view.
STOCKHOLM – Nov. 30, 2018 – Paradox Interactive, a publisher and developer of games that take place all over the world, today announced the date and location for PDXCON 2019, the annual celebration of Paradox’s global community of fans and players. PDXCON 2019 will occur in Berlin, Germany, taking place on October 19-20, 2019, with debut announcements, appearances, and presentations featured for all attendees. Tickets for PDXCON 2019 will be available for sale early next year, with multiple admission tiers offering a variety of exclusive perks to attendees.
PDXCON 2019 will be the third annual public convention for all things Paradox, where fans will have the chance to meet the creators of their favorite games, connect with fellow players and top creators within the Paradox community, and find out what’s in store for future titles. 2019 will mark the first year that the fan convention is held outside of Paradox’s hometown of Stockholm, offering greater opportunity for fans to attend from a wider variety of locations. Details on event hotels and accommodation will be shared early next year.
“PDXCON has come to mean a lot to our fans, and to all of us inside Paradox as well,” said Ebba Ljungerud, CEO of Paradox Interactive. “It’s not just a milestone for us as a company, it’s a personal highlight. As our first public PDXCON to take place outside of the comfort of our ‘home field,’ we intend to make this year’s show worthy of the global stage — bigger and bolder than ever before. I’ll see you all there!”
At this year’s Samsung Developer Conference (SDC), the themes of growing and expanding Bixby’s AI capabilities and highlighting the growth of the SmartThings brand were two of the ongoing tentpole focuses for the conference and the Korean technology giant. However, the elephant in the room was the oft-rumored foldable phone Samsung was said to be developing and might be showing at SDC 2018.
On the main stage, toward the end of the keynotes, Samsung announced the development of a new user interface, OneUI for the latest Samsung Galaxy smartphones, the company started showing previous Galaxy screens, with each successive iteration of the flagship phone having their evolution highlighted. Then Justin Denison, SVP of Mobile Product Marketing spotlighted the next step to come: and that was the foldable phone display technology announcement, namely Samsung’s Infinity Flex Display.
The Infinity Flex Display technology is a multi-layered polymer, which includes the cover window, shock-absorbent film, a thin polarizer, a flexible layer, and the backplane. On stage, Dennison suggested the film can handle the hundreds of thousands of possible times a flexible display device might be flexed-unflexed.
Google, in the keynote following the foldable display tech reveal — and in the subsequent packed-full panel with Samsung and ap developer Flipboard, “Is Your App Ready for Foldable Phones?” — confirmed they will offer developer support for the new Samsung foldable phones.
The panel talk delved a bit further into the design of the technology, albeit with many unanswered questions. On the inside a 7.3-inch display when fully unfolded. When the screen is closed, a 4.5-inch screen serves as the smartphone screen. Up to three apps can function simultaneously, or a single app can use the “multi active window” space in different ways. In a mobile game, for example, one screen area might be used for messaging while the other two screen areas are a game play screen and another might be a leaderboard or map.
On the subject of mobile game developers (and also app advertisers), this new form factor represents the unexplored real estate in using a foldable screen. The closest comparison is how some game developers have considered ways of using secondary screens with the mobile-only Nintendo DS and the mobile-optionally Nintendo Wii U. How game developers will use multiple screens or even the folding or bendable form factor itself will be a fascinating process, as developers have the option to look past familiar screen space for new game concepts, user interfaces and so forth.
After the Samsung Developer Conference
Following Samsung’s event, several companies have announced their own versions of foldable phones, so this is now a race to own as much of the market share of a new form of smartphone before anyone else does. For now, Samsung has had the biggest, most high-impact reveal, so many eyes will be on what Android’s biggest smartphone player will go to market with.
As of now, as further details and rumors have found their way out into the wild about Samsung’s foldable phone, a few cohesive ideas about this phone beyond the prototype seen earlier this month have started to take shape. The phone has frequently been referred to as the Galaxy F or Galaxy Flex, according to several media sites. The Samsung flexible phone is rumored to be available globally in early 2019, with a hefty 512GB internal storage, in black and silver.
One of the most frequently cited details is the potential price tag of $1700 for the first wave of these devices from Samsung. It’s certainly expensive in terms of smartphone cost curves, but not unusual for the first iteration of any device before production ramps up and competition compels an argument for cost-cutting.
This foldable phone represents an evolution on a decade-old smartphone design formula. How flexible consumers and game developers are in adopting, and adapting to, this new technology will be an evolutionary process of its own.
Less than a month after the conclusion of TwitchCon 2018 in San Jose, California, the livestreaming and influencer-focused platform announced this morning they are expanding the convention franchise with the forthcoming TwitchCon Europe 2019 event. TwitchCon Europe 2019 will be hosted at the CityCube venue in Berlin, Germany on April 13-14th.
Now that #TwitchCon 2018 is over, we knew we couldn’t wait a whole year to do it all again. So we’re not going to.
TwitchCon has concluded its fourth year after the 2018 event, but the addition of the new show will make the convention a biannual event. TwitchCon is a show built around its large platform of streamers and influencers and even larger audience, most of whom are gamers, features an expo hall, streamer meet-and-greets, talks and panels, and parties. While condensed into a smaller timeframe, it’s reasonable to expect most of these signature features to be translated intact to TwitchCon Europe 2019.
On a brief official FAQ posted online, Twitch promises different pass options, which will go on sale at a future date. Accessibility needs and multilingual content and interpretation in “English, German, and French” ill also be covered.
But rest east, TwitchCon fans, as the FAQ states that this event is an addition to, not a replacement for, the annual cornerstone event in North America. Still, it may be a while before any news about TwitchCon 2019 emerges since the most recent event was just hosted in late October.
Expect more information about programming, speakers, sponsors and more details to start filling in for TwitchCon Europe 2019 in in the fairly near future. To check out more info about TwitchCon Europe 2019, the website starting point is here.
Berlin, 20 November, 2018 – Exciting prospects: gamesweekberlin is being restructured. This will see the Berlin-based event specialist Booster Space extending its portfolio and acquiring QUO VADIS – create.game.business. Steeped in tradition, the most important German conference for game developers has previously been owned by Aruba Events GmbH, a subsidiary of Computec Media GmbH. Aruba Events has ceded the brand of QUO VADIS and all the associated rights to Booster Space with immediate effect.
Booster Space founder and managing director Michael Liebe: ¨The acquisition is an important step to consolidating and further expanding the relevance of gamesweekberlin as Europe’s leading platform for the combination of the games industry, technology and culture. The acquisition of QUO VADIS is another strategic milestone for Booster Space and gamesweekberlin. 2018 had already seen the expansion merging of various gamesweekberlin events in a central location become a major success. We are pleased to now continue QUO VADIS as the centrepiece of gamesweekberlin and as a central communication platform for developers and professional delegates as well as being able to develop new ideas, perspectives and plans for future operations.”
gamesweekberlin along with its partner events will increasingly be able to benefit from the synergies in this new structure. As a consequence, in future, the week’s central events – these are the inspiring Womenize! and the family-friendly Gamefest in addition to the business event – will be organised by the same team at one location. This will also lead to greater efficiency in the collaboration with the A MAZE. / Berlin Festival and the Matchmaking Dinner. Existing partnerships such as those with game – Verband der deutschen Games-Branche e.V. or games:net berlinbrandenburg, wIll be continued.
QUO VADIS will be gradually modified as part of the consolidation process: forward-looking trends in the sector will basically remain the most important components of this event. In order to make the participants’ experience in Berlin even more profitable, the topics will be offered in compact modules to specific target groups.
The thematic focuses in 2019 will centre on mobile games development, monetisation and publishing, community management and live operations as well as on production financing and distribution. Further topics are to be identifed in tandem with the developer community. Well established formats of QUO VADIS such as the business networking system of MeetToMatch and the exhibition will carry on the tradition.
QUO VADIS was founded in Oberhausen in 2003 by Aruba Events (known at the time as Aruba Studios) and is thus the longest-standing European conference for games developers. In 2007, the event moved to Berlin. This subsequently resulted in the launching of the German Games Days (Deutsche Gamestage) at the initiative of Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg. In the intervening years, attendance at QUO VADIS grew from 500 participants to around 3,000 in 2013. In the following year, Booster Space – which had been established in 2013 – founded the umbrella brand of the ¨International Games Week Berlin¨ under whose auspices QUO VADIS became significantly more international and featured as the main event of the new week of events along with A MAZE. / Berlin, the Gamefest at the Computer Games Museum, and the Matchmaking Dinner.
Booster Space has since rebranded the International Games Week Berlin as gamesweekberlin and created the platform for new talents, Womenize! Games and Tech, and the Game Cinema programme of events. In collaboration with Virtual Reality e.V. Berlin Brandenburg, Booster Space established the VR professional event of VR NOW Con & Awards, organised the gamescom congress for game – Verband der deutschen Games-Branche and the Koelnmesse, and ran the Intel Buzz programme of workshops in Germany and Poland. Booster Space is the developer and publisher of the DUEL VR computer game.
The QUO VADIS – create.game.business conference underpins the goal of Booster Space to connect technology, business and culture together with events and consultancy services.
“Organising and expanding this year’s QUO VADIS with a new team was an exciting challenge which we were happy to master,¨ say the two project managers Dirk Gooding and Simon Fistrich from Computec Media. “We are convinced that, by passing the brand on to Michael Liebe and his fantastic team, we are putting QUO VADIS into experienced hands to see the conference being developed even further. We wish Booster Space lots of success with this!“
Felix Falk, managing director of game – the German Games Industry Association: ¨The gamesweekberlin is one of the leading events of the games industry in Germany and is noticed beyond the capital. The concentration of many individual events in one place and the future development of QUO VADIS are precisely the right step. This means that gamesweekberlin will continue to serve as the perfect stage every two years for the presentation of the German Computer Game Awards. Both events jointly increase the interest in games and their development in Germany and are therefore one of the most important events for media to report about computer and video games far outside the usual confines of the trade press. We wish the team of Booster Space lots of success.¨
Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg is funding gamesweekberlin as well as many other events such as A MAZE./Berlin, Deutscher Computerspielpreis and Quo Vadis.
Helge Jürgens, managing director Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg: Medienboard has been supporting gamesweekberlin from the very beginning and we are proud that it has become one of the most important national and international events for the games industry. We welcome QUO VADIS remaining an integral part of gamesweekberlin thanks to the acquisition by Booster Space and are looking forward to a successful future of the conference!“
