sp infocomm club

Gaming Convention Asia(GCA) Student's Day Write Up

It was an aweome day at GCA 2008. The event started off with Prof Henry Jenkins II from MIT, who gave an interesting talk about the past and the future of gaming. His talk was extremely entertaining; filled with pictures of games from the past and present which everyone in the room could relate to. No words on his slides; just pictures! 

The next speaker was from Digipen. The speaker used to be CEO of nitendo and Digipen and he is now retired. He is Claude Comair. He gave an insight of what game development is, and how to enter the gaming industry. Having created a gaming institute; he emphasized the importance of gaming education. For the finale, he showed us some of his students' completed projects. We were too awestruck to take any pictures. They looked like scenes out of Halo. Yes, the quality of work done is that good. If I was working in the Halo production, I would have hired his students on the spot. XD

Next up was Nexon's speaker, Joonmo Kwon. Nexon is the creator of maple story, audution and 30 other multi-player online games. He showed us the buiness aspect of game development, as well as the buiness model of their company.  Their main revenue stream comes from micro-payment. 

What is micro payment? It is collecting very small amounts of money to accumulate revenue. Remember how we can purchase pre-paid cards to purchase Maple items? It costs less than $10 per item, yet the amount generated from selling items at $10 per player accounts for 90% of their total revenue. Imagine that!

FYI: Nexon was the first company to develop the micro payment system. Did you know that MMORPG games has some form of inflation? Also, currently the currency rate for mesos is 10mil mesos for USD $3. Who would have known.

We then proceeded to the exhibition level. The first stop was EA booth

EA latest Game Spores

EA soon to release game, RED ALERT 3. That right, after a decade, RA3 is finally coming.

Rockband Booth

Hasbro Booth

Singapore Poly Booth

 

Misc Sighting

Panda bear free gift- queue for a long, long time first. 

and ended with a Starwars cosplay