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Monday, May 11, 2009
MIT gaming conference: Schilling calls out lack of gaming sales metrics
By Rodney Brown
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The MIT Sloan School of Business was focused Friday on the serious business of having fun.
The Tang Center at MIT was home to the first Business in Gaming conference put on by the school. Among the topics discussed were “serious games,” “digital distribution” and “MMO business models” which featured a panel that included baseball’s Curt Schilling, founder of Maynard-based 38 Studios LLC.
A handful of student clubs helped organize the conference, which drew panelists from local gaming companies such as Turbine Inc. and 2K Boston, as well as Hong Kong-based Sanrio Digital and Mythic Entertainment of Virginia.
Bruce Roberts, a lead scientist at BBN Technologies Inc. in Cambridge, was a speaker in the serious gaming panel, and made the point that there is a significant difference in the business model between the standard fun games and serious games used for training or education. Companies developing serious games will only succeed as long as there is a client paying for the development – nobody is going to invest the many tens of millions of dollars that go into games like Mythic’s new Warhammer Online to make a training game on spec.
On the MMO panel, vice president of business development for Sanrio Digital Robert Ferrari talked about the wide gap between how Western countries approach gaming and how Asian countries deal with the matter. One of the more surprising differences is that almost all games developed for the Asian markets need to be able to be played with one hand, leaving the other free for a cigarette, according to Mythic’s Eugene Evans.
Schilling made a point of calling out the need for clear and accurate metrics for the marketing and sales in the game space.
“This industry is full of crap, from a data standpoint,” Schilling said.
According to one of the conference organizers, second-year Sloan student Roy Ben-Ami, approximately 250 people attended the conference, including many spur-of-the-moment walk-ins.
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