Letter from the Director
Preparing for the Dorky Years Ahead
So there we were, just minding our own business, and all of a sudden everything is casual. It’s gotten so bad, in fact, that I saw where someone said that World of Warcraft was more successful than Everquest because WoW is somehow “more casual.” Wow indeed.
Naturally, I’m flattered by such comparisons, because it’s evidence that we have done our job in spreading the word that the casual games industry is a healthy, vibrant, exciting (and lucrative) place to be. When even the most successful core games are straining to be thought of as casual, we must be doing something right.
Of course, we can’t be satisfied with what we’ve become because there is so much left to do. We’re still part of a very young industry, one which has yet to reach even adolescence. At the risk of straining a metaphor, think about how dorky and confused you were as a young, barely-pubescent teenager. Is there anyone more likely than an eighth-grader to do something unambiguously stupid? Well, as an industry, eighth grade is still a few years away. It’s a very scary thought, isn’t it?
While we still have some time left as the adorable toddler, may I suggest that we continue to do the kinds of things that have made us the envy of the game world? Specifically, that means continuing to make new and exciting games, of course, but it’s so much more than that. We need to be equally clever about all aspects of our business if we expect to continue to grow.
As a matter of fact, I’d go so far as to say that innovation, more than any other thing, has been at the heart of our success to this point. And it doesn’t take a post-graduate degree to realize that innovation will also be the key to making it through the next few years without ruining what we have so far.
That’s why we have made a particular point of integrating innovation into our conferences. Our purpose is not to tell you to how to innovate. Rather we’re hoping to motivate you through good old-fashioned nagging to continuously seek new and better ways of doing what you do. Through research, case studies, and more than a few hallway conversations, we hope to inspire something so brilliant that it’s what everyone’s talking about a year from now.
Please consider this just another push intended to inspire you to do something no one else has thought of but which everyone will want to imitate. It’s only through such fresh thinking that we will avoid losing our friends by going all dorky and stupid in the next few years.
Jessica
