I think that Facade will take quite a while to spread fully, even among the gaming community. Both the genre (interactive drama) and the game’s origin as a research project represent relatively unexplored territories — so fewer potential players will be actively tuned into these channels. The size of the file is an unfortunate hinderance.

But I want to say that Facade is an experience that hints vividly at the potential of the genre, and that really deserves to be spread as far as possible. In fact, I don’t think there exists anything else so poised to disseminate the noble ideal of Interactive Drama. I mean, isn’t it the *first* interactive drama?

So for that reason, big congrats to both of you on the Player’s Choice Award!

I can only burn so many DVDs; I only have so many friends. I don’t know how else to help this thing spread. But it really needs to spread.

Ian, thanks for clarifying the ad revenue info, and nope, I didn’t happen to hear people talking about GBA. There wasn’t a talk or track on handheld in particular this year. In fact there were only a few talk-talks (much of the presentations were sort of newbie-training oriented), and the ones there were tended to be broad and informal, except for the more corporate pitch talks from Microsoft Live Arcade, and from Apple promoting Mac games (which were interesting actually).

They mentioned that the Casual Games conference is more business oriented, where IndieGamesCon is more developer / community oriented. There were about 300 attendees.

Chris Crawford was briefly there (he lives a few hours from Eugene) and thought it had a bit of the feel of the GDC when it first began way back when (Chris was a founder of the original GDC, when it was called Computer Game Developers Conference).

I’ve been meaning to start a thread about this over on WCG, but I thought I’d ask if you heard anything about it at this event.

Lies. Or distortions at least. It’s not a lie that ad revenue is down — it is — but that it’s getting picked up in games. Rather, some small fraction of that revenue is getting picked up in games. But I can tell you from a LOT of personal experience that it’s not a slam dunk, that you have to know how the advertising and marketing worlds work, and that the ad world has a very complex topology which the average indie game dev doesn’t understand.

The television advertising market in the US is $60 billion/year. 26% of that is nearly $7 billion, which is almost the size of the ENTIRE commercial videogame software business. The Yankee Group, a market research firm, tracked in-game ads as a $34 million business in 2004, and while they are projecting growth to $1 billion by the end of the decade, there is a grave danger that a lot of that revenue will come from ads detrimental to games. I’ve written and talked about this endlessly elsewhere, and I’m not going to repeat myself here.

Anyway, I had to step in and correct that massive overstatement.