The sixth edition of the Montreal International Game Summit occurred on November 16^th and 17^th and I’m still thinking about the event. No official stats are out yet, but more than 1500 people were expected to attend the Summit. I can tell that there were many people there, both days, and it was amazing a many people from different expertise could find conferences, seminars or workshop that fit their needs. Being a production manager, I attended conferences on production, but there were presentations about art, technologies and design too. Here’s how it went for me.

Yoichi Wada, president and CEO of the Square Enix Group opened the event with a very inspiring keynote, talking about the corporate philosophy and the new group-wide game development environment they are building.  I also enjoyed the humor and passion of Reid Schneider. During his talk named “Preaching to the Choir: Do We Make Games For Ourselves?” he mentioned the projects he’s proud of, and those he’s ashamed of, it was really funny how he presented that.

I went to some other presentations on Scrum, relationships within teams, collaboration skills and production planning. I really enjoyed those, because I learned many things and opened my mind as much as confirming that the way I manage my projects, people centric, is a nice way to go because you can get more from your teams this way.

Jason Holtman from Valve also came to talk about digital distribution and Steam. It was interesting because we are discovery a new way to evolve our games and get them bigger without getting bankrupt. By delivering a game online with just a couple of features and adding new features from time to time will help giving a game that gamers like (through their feed-back you can improve the game), stay in the business and extend the life of the game.

Chris Hecker’s closing presentation was fun, because the guy is a real comedian and has great ideas. He ended his talk by asking the developers to work hard on delivering games with a message, as much as music, books and movies has messages. This way, video games can be considered as Art one day. This is what we all want, right?

Next year, the Summit will be held on November 8th and 9th and I’m really looking forward to attend it for a second year. How did you like the 2009 edition? Are you already planning to go next year?

Okay, if you have read my yesterday’s post, you know that Montreal was host of the International Game Summit on November 16th and 17th.  Today I attended conferences that where more production centric, more “technical” in some ways, but there were great presentations good for everyone.

I went to Clinton Keith’s conference on Lean production, which was presented with concrete examples of game production situations. For those who know about Scrum, Lean production is another Agile method of production adopted by many studios and it answer issues that Scrum sometime fails to address. It can also be a complement to Scrum, so if you are actually using Scrum right now and you are not satisfied, you can turn to Lean Production instead of going back to Waterfalls. There is many details that where talked about during the presentation and real life examples where key to understanding the added value to the production phase of a game.

I attended Dorian Kieken’s presentation on the “Living Plan”. I found the presentation useful as well, and I also consider it as a complement to Clinton’s conference. He also talked a little bit about Scrum, but more on the production planning process and how to adapt and evolve your plan during the life of your projects. One of many things I learned during his speaking is the “Broken Window Theory”, and I found it very interesting because we can apply this theory many things.

My first day at the Summit was simply awesome! Many interesting keynotes, passionate people and good energy where at rendez-vous to meet my expectations.

Wada San, as introduced by Stéphane D’Astous, was really interesting in his presentation because he was not only talking about games, he was talking about entertainment in general. He insisted that the word “game” was intentionally omitted in Square Enix Group’s philosophy: “To spread happiness across the globe by providing unforgettable experiences”. In order to spread this happiness around the globe, you have to take into account global diversities.  According to Yoichi Wada, It's not because of the country, or because of age. Rather, lifestyles have to be taken into account to consider the nature of our customers. We talk about different areas, but we have to know about different cultures. You can be at the opposite side of the planet to someone and in a different age group but still have chances to have similar hobbies, or totally different ones.

Square Enix is working on spreading offices around the planet to make sure to reach his objective. Eidos acquisition was part of that plan and I don’t know if it was an official announcement, but Wada San mentioned that the first project coming from Eidos as part of the Square Enix Group would be from Montreal, as the third project of the Eidos Montreal offices.

So here we are, a couple of days before the International Game Summit of Montreal, the annual event aimed at professionals and specialists in the gaming industry from all over the globe. I am getting pretty excited to see the conferences, meet people and check out the upcoming trends of the gaming world. This year will be the sixth edition of the event, and more than 1,500 people are expected to attend the two-day event held on November 16th and 17th.

Montreal is one of the major cities in the gaming industry. Ubisoft has his biggest studio where many big games are being developed, such as Assassin’s Creed (1 and 2), Rainbow Six Vegas and one of the most anticipated games of this year, Avatar. We also have Eidos, which is developing their firsts 2 games – Deus Ex 3 and Thief 4. If you know the game Wet (released in September 09), you should know that the studio behind it, Artificial Mind and Movement (A2M), is also based in Montreal, along with EA, Gameloft and many other studios. There is great talent here in Montreal, which is probably why an event like the MIGS is so popular here.

During the event, there will be about 80 courses, seminars, conferences and workshops focused on everything from programming and Serious Games, to visual arts, game design, production and audio design. There is something for everyone, and more than a hundred speakers from the local and international scene will be there to showcase new trends.

There are many lectures I want to attend, and with such a packed schedule for the event, choosing which ones is hard. But what interest me the most are the conferences on production and game design. Being a production manager, it's obvious to me that these are the ones that shouldn’t be missed. The one I am looking forward to the most is the main conference; Yoichi Wada, President and CEO of Square Enix, is opening the event with his lecture, "Fostering Cultural Diversity in Game Development", in which he will discuss the "steps the Group has taken, providing to those involved with the global video game industry a vision of future game development." This will be done with the use of the three core brands (Square Enix, Taito and Eidos) and their individual characteristics.

This is going to be really interesting, there are so many things to see and learn about during these events. What are you most interested in during these events? Which conferences are you planning on attending?