February 17, 2010
In This Issue

LOGINBeat

Additional LOGIN 2010 Speakers Announced
Meeting of the Minds: The Digital Distribution Revolution
Industry Highlights

Electronic Arts: Lost in an Alien Landscape
Make life a game and save the world
WoW Subs Level Off: Chinese Government to Blame?
Wizard101 Launches iPhone Virtual Currency App
China grants permission for launch of The Burning Crusade
Flickr Founders Working On Weird MMOG: Glitch

Sponsorship Opportunities Available at LOGIN 2010

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Additional LOGIN 2010 Speakers Announced

We're pleased to announce additions to our all-star cast of speakers for LOGIN 2010. We'll continue to announce speakers each week in LOGIN Beat, and you can always see the most current list of speakers on the conference speaker page.

Session selection is still ongoing, so if you submitted a proposal and have not heard anything yet, don't despair. We had a tremendous number of submissions this year, and it will probably be a few more weeks until we've made final decisions on sessions.

See the complete list of speakers

	Rick Lambright Chief Architect, Gazillion Entertainment Rick is Chief Architect at Gazillion Entertainment where a variety of MMOs are in development, including LEGO Universe, Jumpgate Evolution, and Marvel Super Hero Squad. Rick’s game industry experience began at Starwave in 1995 as server architect and lead server programmer on the pioneering MMO Castle Infinity, the first fully released MMO designed for children. Subsequently Rick was Director of Online Technology at Humongous and Cavedog Entertainment where he wrote the networking for Total Annihilation and led the team that created the Boneyards online gaming system for GT Interactive. Rick was subsequently VP of Internet Engineering at LithTech and Director of Online Technology at Monolith and was the lead engineer on The Matrix Online. In 2005 he joined Secret Lair Studios, which was acquired by Vivendi in 2006 and became Sierra Online Seattle. Rick was Technical Director at Sierra Online, during which time the studio shipped Carcassonne for XBLA.
	Anne Toole Writer Anne Toole is a writer and game designer who focuses on bringing fun, meaningful, and relevant content to games. Her credits include the MMO WIZARD 101 and THE WITCHER, an RPG which earned her a Writers Guild nomination with Sande Chen. As a contract writer and designer, she has written entertainment and serious games for DS, the 360, Wii, and PC in a variety of game and narrative genres, including an upcoming horror-comedy for the Wii. Anne also served on staff as the first Head Writer for the MMO STARGATE WORLDS and has written for NBC serial DAYS OF OUR LIVES. Anne started her career in television and has worked in syndication, cable, broadcast primetime and daytime. Due to her transmedia experience, Anne has spoken about games and entertainment for the inaugural Nokia OpenLab 2008 as well as at South by Southwest, the ION Game Conference, and Comic-con International. She contributed chapters to the IGDA's Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing and Writing for Video Game Genres books and serves as the Mentorship Chair for the Women in Games SIG. A citizen of the EU as well as the US, Anne holds a degree in Archaeology from Harvard.
	Keith Lee CEO, Booyah Keith is a veteran of the interactive entertainment industry with a proven track record of helping create best-selling video games, developing compelling experiences, and attracting broad audiences into the gaming space. Prior to founding Booyah, Keith was the Lead Producer for Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo III franchise. The Diablo series has sold over 20 million copies worldwide. Before Blizzard, Keith's roles as the Project Manager and Lead Programmer for Insomniac Games helped propel the Ratchet & Clank series to surpass 10 million units sold. Leading up to the games industry, Keith worked at several investment banks, including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Keith graduated from Stanford University with a BS in Computer Science and a BA in International Relations and Economics. In his spare time, Keith impersonates Hiro Nakamura from Heroes and chases people around downtown Palo Alto, California with a samurai sword.
	Sande Chen Writer and Game Designer Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose game credits span 10 years in the industry. Her writing credits include 1999 Independent Games Festival winner Terminus and the PC RPG of the Year, The Witcher, for which she was nominated for a 2007 Writers Guild Award in Videogame Writing. She is the co-author of Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform and a contributor to Writing for Video Game Genres, Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing, and Secrets of the Game Business. In 2006, she was profiled as one of the game industry's top 100 most influential women. She has spoken about games at conferences around the globe, including the Game Developers Conference, Austin Game Conference, and the Serious Games Summit D.C. She also has a Grammy nomination.
	Rob Huber Senior Server Engineer, The Amazing Society Rob Huber is a Senior Server Engineer at The Amazing Society, a studio of Gazillion Entertainment. Rob is currently concentrating on an enterprise scale deployment of (CEP) complex event processing for an enterprise corporate entertainment company with studios throughout the United States. Prior to joining Gazillion Entertainment Rob was a Senior Server Engineer at the Sierra Online studio of Activision/Blizzard. In addition to holding a Bachelor of Science degree from the Northeast University he holds a patent for a Remote Development Support System and Method, and contributed to a product granted the SMT Vision award. Rob lives in Sammamish, Washington, with his wife Shuling and their two young children. He likes to listen to classical music and, when he has time, he likes to hike in open spaces and ride his bike.

I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.

Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

The Digital Distribution Revolution

When was the last time you entered a local store to purchase a music CD of your favorite band? Consider the time you accidentally scratched that CD because it was left on the cupboard near the cutlery set in the kitchen. I won't bother getting into all those occasions where you lost your precious media because it got jammed in the couch cushions or left on the car dash to melt in the summer heat. Thankfully, we are blessed with a plethora of choices in either recovering physical media, or better yet, obtaining the contents virtually.

Sometimes we're simply too lazy to get off the couch and walk down to the neighboring video store to pick up a late night movie. Wouldn't it be far easier, cheaper, and faster to click the remote already in-hand and summon up a new movie instantly? Wouldn't it be easier and in the best interest for companies to provide this simple and immediate, "on-demand" access? While physical media can be a beautiful thing to hold and is tangible in such a way as to feel like it's truly ours, it's really a bulky and inefficient way of distributing media.

The cost of physical distribution can be extravagant. Consider FedEx's 2lb. shipping rates from New York to Los Angeles. It costs nearly $100 to ship a tape overnight, and this doesn't even take into account insurance or high value items, not to mention "opportunity costs" (loss, theft, errors, and other reasons). How much does it costs to distribute that same media digitally, all else being equal? About a minute of time and even less in pennies. It's actually a challenge to find statistics on how much it costs for distributing a single piece of online media, mainly because the costs are so trivial on this scale.

While cable companies can be said to have spearheaded the digital distribution revolution years ago, companies like Netflix and event Blockbuster have recently taken it to an entirely new level. They have begun providing on-demand access not just for our cable boxes, but for our entire home network; a system that is expected to converge with every major piece of electronics in one's home in the coming years. The ultimate benefit of this convergence is to provide the consumer all the media they would ever want, instantly. Businesses reap rewards through far less overall costs and increased breadth of content offerings available.

Read full article and post your comments

Mathew Anderson
Contributing Editor
LOGIN Beat

Industry Highlights

Electronic Arts: Lost in an Alien Landscape

The leading maker of computer games is struggling as people turn to cheaper, online alternatives. John Riccitiello saw the crisis coming. In August 2007, soon after becoming CEO of video game maker Electronic Arts (ERTS), he gathered 160 lieutenants in New York and warned them that the $20 billion industry was headed for trouble. The major players were clinging to the model of selling shrink-wrapped games for $60 a pop, while users were turning to far cheaper online games. Only by "jumping into the abyss," he said, and radically changing itself could EA survive the looming shakeout. »

Article on BusinessWeek

Make life a game and save the world

Game designer Jane McGonigal is adamant that epic wins can save the world. Epic wins are videogame moments when players unflinchingly take on horrendous enemies for a greater good, and usually a mountain of experience points that let them "level-up" characters with improved abilities. "A goal for the next decade is to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games," McGonigal told a rapt audience at a prestigious TED Conference that ends Saturday. Approximately three billion hours are devoted weekly to playing videogames online. The veteran game designer argued that the amount of play time must be bumped up to 21 billion hours weekly to solve global ills such as hunger, poverty, and climate change. »

Story from AFP

WoW Subs Level Off: Chinese Government to Blame?

Since its launch in 2004, World of Warcraft has dominated the gaming industry, regarded as the most-successful and popular MMO in history. Around this time last year, Blizzard boasted more than 11.5 million subscribers worldwide after Wrath of the Lich King's release. For the first time since its inception, WoW's seemingly-boundless momentum might be leveling off, according to Activision-Blizzard's recent end-of-fiscal-year conference call with its investors. Blizzard president Mike Morhaime revealed that WoW's current subscriber base is 11.5 million; the same figure announced in November 2008. »

Article on ZAM

Wizard101 Launches iPhone Virtual Currency App

The App Store may forbid direct sale of virtual currency in iPhone games, but the developers of freemium MMO Wizard101 have still found a way to let users earn virtual currency through that platform. Today Wizard101 developer Kingsisle Entertainment announced the launch of their first iPhone game, WizardBlox. At the end of each session players spend in this free match-3 puzzle game, users receive a code that can be redeemed at Wizard101 for a certain amount of the game's Crowns virtual currency. »

Story on Virtual Worlds News

China grants permission for launch of The Burning Crusade

China’s oversight agency has granted permission for Blizzard Entertainment’s Chinese partner, NetEase.com, to launch an important expansion pack for World of Warcraft. The General Administration of Press and Publication in China will allow NetEase.com to launch World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, an expansion pack which launched in 2007 in the U.S. The approval is a victory for Blizzard Entertainment, a division of Activision Blizzard, which has been trying to comply with Chinese regulators — who censor content in online games — so that it can continue to operate in what has become the biggest market for World of Warcraft. »

Story on GamesBeat

Flickr Founders Working On Weird MMOG: Glitch

The cofounders of Flickr, the photo sharing site, are working on a new problem-solving MMOG aimed at the casual player. Here's a little known fact: many of the tools that later became the photograph sharing site, Flickr, were developed for a game project called Game Neverending. That game began development in 2002 and featured unprecedented community interaction, players could create their own zones, but little in the way of actual gameplay. It was eventually cancelled in 2004, and its tools morphed into what would become Flickr. Now, Stuart Butterfield, cofounder of Flickr, and his company Tiny Speck, are going back to their roots and designing a light-hearted 2D game called Glitch which aims to fill the gap between World of Warcraft and FarmVille. Glitch is planning on launching by the end of 2010 and will be entering alpha status soon. »

Story on The Escapist

Sponsorship Opportunities Available at LOGIN 2010

Without our sponsors there would be no LOGIN! We are currently seeking sponsors for the 2010 event. Interested? To learn more about sponsorship opportunities at LOGIN visit the sponsorship page on our website, contact Cynthia Freese at cynthia@loginconference.com, or call 1.425.533.5973.

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