austin-game-developers-conference posts

The Austin Game Developers Conference continued today with a presentation by Blizzard personnel on the inner workings of their hit MMO World of Warcraft. Our sister site WoW Insider attended the conference and has an audio recording of the hour long keynote from Blizzard VP J. Allen Brack and production director Frank Pearce. Some of the interesting facts in the presentation include:

• The game evolved out of the Warcraft II team which split into two groups after finishing that game. One worked on Warcraft III and the other started work on a squad-based sci-fi RPG game called Nomad. However they were not happy with how that game was progressing and decided to cancel Nomad and work on a Warcraft-themed MMO instead.
• Only 37 people actually work on World of Warcraft itself in terms of game design. Of course there are lots of other people involved in the game's develoment including 123 folks in cinematics, 51 artists, community service members and others.
• "Patch day" for the game is a huge event in terms of data for Blizzard. They state that for the recent patch 3.1 they had 4.7 petabytes of data go through their pipes to update the game. That's 4,700 thousand terebytes. And almost half of that data is audio related.
• Despite charging $125 for one ticket to their two day event (not to mention the revenue generated though DirectTV/Internet streaming and sales of exclusive merchandise at the store) Blizzard runs their annual BlizzCon event at a "substantial loss", but added that the event is still worth it from a marketing and PR stance.
• Finally, the current bug count for World of Warcraft is huge. How huge? Try 179,484 bugs in the game right now that Blizzard is tracking.

Harvey Smith, Lead Designer for the classic Deus Ex, will be the keynote speaker for the Game Career Seminar at this year's Austin Game Developers Conference on September 17th. The keynote will focus on careers in game design, and is titled "Luckiest People Alive" [sic].

Smith, currently with Arkane Studios, will be speaking on what he foresees as "an imminent explosion of change, creativity, and possibility within the world of interactive entertainment." Being a publication that loves explosions of all types, we're all for it. Other speakers will include representatives from Aspyr Media, Game Developer Magazine, and Vicarious Visions.

[Thanks, Gryphon!]

The Austin Game Developers Conference is rapidly approaching and the September 15-27 gathering of game creators in Austin, Texas just named one of its keynote speakers, the well known sci-fi novelist Bruce Sterling (who happens to live in Austin). The time and day for his speech have yet to be announced.

Alone with William Gibson and other writers, Sterling was one of the first of the so-called "cyberpunk" writers in the science fiction literary field. He is also the author of non-fiction articles and books including the well known book The Hacker Crackdown which detailed the US government's efforts to go after computer hackers in the 1980s, sometimes with embarrassing results. Sterling's keynote speech for Austin GDC 2008 is titled "Computer Entertainment 35 Years from Today."