2008 Wuxi International Digital Arts Forum

The city of Wuxi, China (about 80 miles west of Shanghai) is a magnet for animation studios and a growing number of game studios. This weekend Wuxi sponsored their first annual International Digital Arts Forum, which was attended by about 300 professionals, government officials, and the press. Emergent was invited to present there, due to its growing popularity in China. I gave an overview of Emergent and Gamebryo, and it was received quite well. I made quite a few government and press contacts (both so important in China), and picked up some new sales leads, as well.

The Chinese certainly know how to hold an event. It was held indoors at a high tech park in Wuxi, and when they announced the Forum to be officially open, fireworks went off on the stage (see picture at right). Just bright white fountains, but still - it was cool. One of my sons suggested that we try indoor fireworks at our home on the next Fourth of July. We'll see if the Mrs. will approve that.....

The lighting stinks so I apologize, but this is me during my presentation. The audience had been sitting there for 2.5 hours of university professor lectures before I got up, so to wake them up, we did some audience participation stuff.

The Chinese love formal signing ceremonies. This one between a university in Beijing and one in Stockholm.

I want to be like this guy sitting down on the right. Wearing a suit and tie and get hot? Just roll up the legs in your suit pants!

Chongqing University Visit

This past Thursday, we visited Chongqing University in the Chinese southern city of Chongqing. Most cities in China fall under the governorship of a province (the Chinese equivalent of a "state" in the U.S.), but Chongqing is run by the Chinese Central Government (I guess sort of like Washington, D.C. is). It's a tiny little city of about 31 million people (that's only slightly smaller than all of California!), and it is best known for it's spicy foods (so they tell me). The university here, too, is quite prestigious. The university also sponsors a commercial entity that acts as an incubation center for independent studios.

We had a GREAT meeting with university officials (see picture at right), and look forward to extensive cooperation with them for academic and commercial purposes. The details of which I will not put in such a public forum as this blog, but suffice to say that the possibilities are really cool. It will also require me wearing a suit and tie and shaking hands with government officials, which will get picked up in a very huge way all across China.

We went to dinner that evening with the university officials, and had a great meal. The meal included, of all things, duck tongue (yes, I ate some, and DB now calls me "tongue eater"). But undoubtedly, the highlight of the evening was EVERYBODY in the restaurant stopping to look at big screens all over the restaurant, to watch the successful launch of China's third manned mission to space. The patriotic fervor in the room was awesome - it was cool.

We will look forward to growing ties with Chongqing.

Me, apparently doing the Macarena during the meeting.

At dinner that evening.

A view of Chongqing at night.

Games Convention Asia: Singapore

Earlier this month we made an appearance at Games Convention Asia. This was the second annual Asian version of Games Convention held in Leipzig, Germany each year. The show was in two parts, a professional conference on the third floor of the Suntec Convention Center, and a public exhibition area on the fourth floor. The professional conference drew some 700 attendees; we had some good meetings there and developed a few new sales leads, as well. The exhibition area supposedly drew some 92,000 visitors, though traffic there was quite light on the Thursday afternoon that I went up there.

Being the business guy that I am, I stepped out of my comfort zone a bit, and gave a 50-minute presentation entitled "Simplifying Cross-Platform Development in a Multi-Core Environment." I spoke all about the varying multicore architectures of the PS3, the Xbox 360, today's multicore PCs, and even Larabee and Cuda, new architectures by Intel and Nvidia, respectively. And of course, how Gamebryo's Floodgate simplifies development across all those different architectures (and how it even benefits the single core Wii).

Does that sound like a really exciting presentation, or what?! I warned my audience that if they were taking notes, they had better put big ol' rubber erasers on the ends of their pencils, so that when their heads came crashing down in their laps from falling asleep, they didn't accidentally poke an eye out. Most everybody laughed, so apparently this group of attendees had a pretty good command of English.

However, the near-100 attendees seemed to be thoroughly engaged, and folks were highly complimentary of the session. A big hearty THANK YOU goes out to Vincent Scheib and Dan Amerson for their help in prepping me for this presentation!!!

Ntreev was proudly exhibiting Black Shot Online (Powered by Gamebryo) at the show.

A view from the exhibit floor.

Chongqing YuCai Technologies Visit

Friday morning this past week we met with a very talented developer by the name of YuCai Technologies. We had a great meeting, and we expect them to graduate from pre-customer to customer any day now.

These customer visits in China are really great, and help to drive our business. It's always great to be there. That weekend, ironically, we picked up another lead for a studio that is literally just down the street from YuCai. It's a small world!

On the left you'll see a picture of our team with some of the YuCai guys.

Korea: Gamebryo as Far as the Eye Can See

Time being a precious commodity which I am short on, I will not take time to stitch together the three photos, below. So just envision it. These photos were taken from the 26th floor of the Grand Intercontinental Seoul (one of my favorite hotels worldwide, for its service) in Korea. If I were to stitch these together, in one photo you'd be able to see three Gamebryo customers in one setting.

In the photo on the left, you see the building with the "Red Duck" logo. They are a Gamebryo customer. In the middle photo, the tall glass building on the right is Asem Tower, where Neowiz occupies a number of floors. Yup... another Gamebryo customer. EA Korea is also on this building; is it just coincidence that EA acquired 19% of Neowiz last year??? And in the photo on the right, there is a tall glass building in the way, the World Trade Center building. Were it not for that building, you could see the offices of Vertigo, yet another Gamebryo customer. For the purposes of this posting, I thought about blowing up building so we could see Vertigo, but on second thought, realized that the Korean authorities might have a bit of a problem with that.

As always, a big SHOUT OUT to our Korean distributor for doing such a great job for us there!!!

CEDEC in Tokyo

This week is Japan's annual CEDEC event, the Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association's game developers conference. This year the conference is being held at the Showa Women's University in Tokyo - a great venue choice for a game developers conference! I've noticed many MANY more foreigners in attendance at this year's show, so it is obviously growing in popularity overseas. Tomorrow morning Miyamoto-san from Nintendo gives a keynote address; his creativity always inspires.

Emergent sponsored the developer party tonight; lots of food and mingling in the university cafeteria. Miyamoto-san was there; I almost feel sorry for him because he's such a celebrity. Especially here in Japan, when he walks in to a room everybody gets all excited and wants to talk to him. Not entirely unlike when I get home from one of these month-long trips to Asia and the reaction I get from my kids when I walk through the door. OK... well perhaps not my kids, but at least my dog. :-)

Food and merriment at the developer party.

Food and merriment at the developer party.

More of the crowd.

Miyamoto-san posting for cameras.