Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Ten Ton Hammer: Your sister company, Bioware Edmonton, is kind of focusing on this massively single player aspect of gaming. Integrating these social network sites back into single player games rather than into multiplayer MMOs. Do you think AGDC has a place for those sorts of titles too or is it just online networking and MMOs?

Gordon Walton: I think that any game that has an online component or community, clearly there’s value at AGDC for them. Bioware has grown a huge community for years. They’ve always and a strong community outside of their single player games that is totally attached to them. Communities were a real big purpose of Bioware way before Rich and I got involved with them.

Ten Ton Hammer: For your particular studio, how does AGDC help in the development of your game? What did you learn and what could you learn from a game like AGDC? You’ve been in the business a while, so is there still stuff for you to learn every year?

Gordon Walton: You betcha. Every year there’s always a series of sessions I have to attend because I’m going to learn something in them and that’s why I go to the conference whether I’m involved with it or not. There’s always stuff to learn and that’s what the conference is about, sharing best practices so that the whole industry can move forward. What it does for us is help our people learn more and get better. I can’t point and say our title got better because so and so went to this session, but we like our people to get the most experience vicariously that they can so that they don’t have to do it the hard way on our title. 

Ten Ton Hammer: There’s a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes at conferences like this. Is that one of the better reasons for a company to go to this convention too, just because of all the networking that’s involved and maybe you can get a sneak peak at the latest middleware sort of thing like the Hero’s Journey Engine, the Big World Engine, and that type of thing?  

Gordon Walton: I think networking is very valuable in an industry like ours whether you’re an individual person or you own or run a business. It doesn’t really matter what your role is, networking is always really valuable. That’s how you’re able to learn stuff and advance your own career and the interest of your business.

As far as the vendors go, all the vendors that have anything to do with online show up at this show because it’s the best showplace for getting in front of people who are interested in this area. Every year I see technology that I didn’t know was coming that is available for us to purchase or license. I think all that’s good.