GDEX and Midwest Game Dev Scene

I attended GDEX today thanks to the GRID lab and John. It was everything you imagine a gaming expo to be, with cosplay, FPV drone racing, cool demos and so on. While attendance of geeks and nerds was a given anywhere in the world, I was not expecting this much on the supply side in Columbus to be honest.

There were many indie game developers demoing their products. I had several good chats with them. It was really interesting to see my research resonate with the devs own experience. In our ISF paper, we have found that indie market and the AAA market play by completely different rules. It is as if they are operating in different universes with different laws for physics. The indie games behave like what you would expect, if your friends own it you are more likely to own it. If it reaches a certain market share you expect it to keep growing and so on. The AAA titles though seem to be driven more by hype and advertisement, which lessens the effects of network effects to some extend.

Besides getting to talk to people in the trenches, I also got to demo cutting edge VR technology thanks to GRID lab. One of their students had developed a redirected walking experience. Essentially the software tricks your brain into thinking you are walking a straight line while in reality you are going around in circles. That means you get to experience long walks in your room scale VR. Amazing stuff.