A game-changing session

The India Game Developer Summit 2010, organised by Salt March, organisers of the Indian Developer Summit in Bangalore, saw more than 750 participants turning up for the event on Saturday.

While big companies such as Nvidia, Ubisoft India, Adobe, Crytek and Playdom made their presence felt at the event, also present were independent developers and students of game development.

One of the sessions that proved to be a hit with those participating was the opening one hosted by Carl Jones, director of global business development, Crytek, the company which developed Crysis and set new stadards in the world of graphics for gaming.

He spoke about what gamers can expect from the next iteration of the game and the graphic engine.

"The Crytek mantra is to envision, enable and to achieve," he said, while mentioning how the tools made by Crytek for internal use speed up their development of games. Much to the excitement of many students in the hall, he said that students can download and use their development engine and tools for free.

"We' re interested to see what you plan to do with the engine and you can download it from our website. Also, we have recently announced a version of the engine for indie developers, which is priced much lower than a general license. At Crytek, we believe in the concept of WYSIWYG — What You See Is What You Game — so when you are developing something with our tools you'll know what it looks like on all three popular platforms, the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3," he said.

He also announced that their new game Crysis2 would have even lower system requirements than any of the previous games while improving on the graphic capabilities of the game engine.

During a session on PC gaming, Keita Iida, director of global content management, Nvidia, spoke about the importance of gaming cafes in popularising gaming and spreading gaming culture. He mentioned China which went from having 22m gaming cafes in 2001 to 111mn in 2005 and finally 338m in 2009.

"Contrary to popular belief, PC gaming is still growing; while console gaming has been growing in bursts, PC gaming has seen a steady growth over the years. The sales on online services like Steam has grown by more than 200% in the past year," Keita says.

Keita added that there were around 180,000 registered Internet cafes in India and 30% of the visitors to these cafes go for gaming. He lauded the efforts of companies such as Indiagames and Zapak in popularising gaming in the country. He also said that the Indian market for gaming could be as big as $142mn by the end of the year.

Nvidia also had a stall at the event where they demoed a few of their products, but what caught everyone's attention was their 3D Vision kit, which lets gamers play games in 3D. There were also stalls by institutes that specialise in game development such as the Bangalore-based Aiga and DSK Superinfocom.

Also present at the summit was Ubisoft India, who were looking to hire game testers and artists for their Indian studio in Pune. Ubisoft was not the only company hiring as Playdom has also set up an office in Bangalore, much like its competitor Zynga, the company that developed the popular Farmville on Facebook.