For the past month or two I have been listening to the Gamers With Job's podcast. It reminds me a lot of my own podcasting experience with Confab - a bunch of mid-career friends get together and chat about issues while making fun of each other. Except this podcast sticks to video and board games.
The recent DnD episode really made me miss my own pen and paper experiences with friends. It also filled me with regret at how hard it is to find friends like that when you get older.
In episode 148, I really enjoyed comments by Eskil Steenberg. He sounds like a guy I would enjoy hanging out with. Check out his blog.
This episode had some really interesting discussion of the game industry itself. (Skip the gaming section and listen to the last hour or so.)
Episode 148 - August 12th, 2009
Batman: Arkham Asylum, IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey, Starcraft Watching, Wipeout Pure (The Purest), Special Guest and Love Developer Eskil Steenberg, The Future of Motion, Platforms & Tech, Your Emails and more!
GWJ Conference Call Episode 148
Eskil proposes many interesting points:
It does not make sense to spend a lot on PC video hardware because video games are basically built for console now and consoles are years behind PC video hardware.
Natal is a cool "camera" but Microsoft is unlikely to create any software for it that you will actually care about.
10 years ago the video game effort was in code like building an engine. These days the code is well known and the real effort is the artwork. Artists outnumber programmers 10:1 now.
The last thing the game industry wants is a new console platform. Better video hardware means more artwork work which means more costs.
Nintendo has the worst hardware in the industry but they are the best at developing games. (Recently I was thinking about how significant Nintendo's success is.)
He observed that the industry has really changed as more people in the industry just want to play games, not actually write them.
He also had some interesting comments on industry leaders like World of Warcraft, Valve and Nintendo and how different these companies are from the "business guys" at the other companies.
Great stuff.
