Trending: zGames Puts Together DevGAMM Observations

You almost missed it! DevGAMM, one of the leading conferences for gaming industry professionals, was held this May in Moscow, and if you never had a chance to attend, here is our quick improvised chart of news and trends observed at DevGAMM 2015.

#1. All-round Tips and Diverse Case Studies

The event hosted 1500+ attendees: from genre-specific market leaders, game publishers and gaming hardware producers to content localization and online gaming hosting services providers, video game music studios, partner aggregators, recruiters and artists. The participants from a diversity of gaming industry niches demonstrated open-mindness and shared their insight eagerly.

Small indie teams had a good chance to tune on heavy hitters' ardor extending their insight into the productive process during GAMM:Play Showcase and breaking the ice while SpeedGameDating. Keynote sessions featured large developers and publishers presenting their success and fail stories, describing unique game design catches, demonstrating their marketing videos, and holding master classes on gamedev craft specifying a range of how-to’s from UI to monetization details.

#2. Gamespotting

Among the major upsides of DevGAMM 2015 was a significant increase in overall presentation quality. Some guests found the foyer exhibition no less exciting then the sessions, as it served a demo stage for gameplay prototypes of all kinds — from desktop and mobile to browser and social ones. Unexpectedly, the “power balance” looked like there were top-notch and raw games in equal parts, but mediocre ones were exceptionally few.

Several post mortems seemed quite an icing on the cake, looking surprisingly decent, featuring a full set of AI system components, like behavior trees, reaction modes, predictive intelligence of smart objects, and others.

#3. Death of the AAAuthor

One of the major concerns for the game industry community becomes the death of the AAA games segment in its true sense. Taking on that sort of projects may turn into a fatal budget loss, as the AAA development costs a fortune, being pretty capable of ruining even mature studios up to the funeral song. That is where the new round of evolution of social and mobile games market is likely to stem from. Besides, a great number of companies prefer playing safe cutting the development process into a series of episode releases.

#4. Not Quite VR Yet

Some participants noted that they had a mixed sense of disappointment concerning the extent of VR representation, as solutions of this kind were in an obvious minority. Others argued that the event originally had the focus on indie development, thus, such a tendency comes quite natural. Anyway, as it was widely discussed, the situation with VR would be clarified by the beginning of 2016, after the most influential releases within the industry, including Oculus Rift, Morpheus by Sony, and the like.

#5. Unity 5: Max It Out

Notably, one of the most popular gamedev tools for the solutions displayed at the event appeared to be Unity 5, enabling to build games featuring decent graphics quickly and easily, launching it across a number of desktop and mobile platforms — from Windows, Linux, Mac OS X to Windows Phone, Android, and iOS. Above all, quite a portion of criticism came addressing Java.