Pokemon GO GDC Session Canceled

Lizzy Finnegan

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Pokemon GO GDC Session Canceled


"We feel our time and energy right now are best spent on making sure every aspect of the product is where we want it to be."

Niantic Labs' Catch 'Em All: Pokemon Go and Real World Gaming session at the Game Developer's Conference has been canceled. According to the event page [http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/catch-em-all-pokemon-go-and-real-world-gaming], the event, originally scheduled for March 14, promised a discussion about "how the company has developed a unique vision for delivering a mobile Pokemon experience that gets would-be trainers into the outdoors," along with "a first-hand, in-depth look at how players are interacting and exploring the world with one another through Pokemon GO, the collaborative approach to design and development for the game and the next evolution of augmented reality and real-world mobile gameplay experiences."

In a statement provided to Game Informer [http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2016/03/03/pokemon-go-gdc-presentation-canceled.aspx], Niantic CEO John Hanke stated that the decision to forego the GDC talk was made in order to focus the team's energy on the product.

"We have decided to forego our GDC talk on Pokemon Go in order to focus on getting the product ready for beta test and launch," Hanke said. "As much as we hate to disappoint those in the industry attending GDC, we feel our time and energy right now are best spent on making sure every aspect of the product is where we want it to be."

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Xeorm

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I like that. Good to see more companies focusing on building the game and less on conferences.
 

4455

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Xeorm said:
I like that. Good to see more companies focusing on building the game and less on conferences.
What does that even mean? PR and Development are 2 entirely different branches. One's work doesn't affect the other.
 

Xeorm

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4455 said:
What does that even mean? PR and Development are 2 entirely different branches. One's work doesn't affect the other.
The PR portion goes, but also the development team. Often, the people doing talking and whatnot, especially for GDC, will be primarily development team, not PR.

Furthermore, even for conferences where it's mostly the PR people that go, the dev team will be working a lot to make something available for the PR people to show off. Look at how companies will have trailers set up to show off. Assuming it has any bit of "gameplay" footage, it'll have dev team time associated with it. Quite often, that little bit of gameplay requires a fair bit of bandaid work so that they can get things working well enough to show off. Since the bandaid work usually isn't applicable towards the actual game, it's basically wasted effort.

It is, very much so, a large amount of wasted effort for a development team to go to a good conference. Though it can depend on what exactly they're showing.
 

EbonBehelit

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My brain kinda translated what they said into "The game's too much of a mess right now to show without scaring investors".

There's a serious hype balloon around this project right now, and the last thing they want right now is to roll it onto a nail.
 

4455

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Xeorm said:
The PR portion goes, but also the development team. Often, the people doing talking and whatnot, especially for GDC, will be primarily development team, not PR.

Furthermore, even for conferences where it's mostly the PR people that go, the dev team will be working a lot to make something available for the PR people to show off. Look at how companies will have trailers set up to show off. Assuming it has any bit of "gameplay" footage, it'll have dev team time associated with it. Quite often, that little bit of gameplay requires a fair bit of bandaid work so that they can get things working well enough to show off. Since the bandaid work usually isn't applicable towards the actual game, it's basically wasted effort.

It is, very much so, a large amount of wasted effort for a development team to go to a good conference. Though it can depend on what exactly they're showing.
I'm sorry but you're wrong.
 

Xeorm

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4455 said:
I'm sorry but you're wrong.
Well now, how can I refute such a stunning rebuttal? I've only talked personally with people upset about how much time was wasted on these things. But lets see: http://www.gdconf.com/conference/production.html with 5 highlighted sessions, each with listed people talking. Wanna guess how many are production people and not PR?

Jonathan Dower: Game Artist 1/0
Mike Acton: Engine Director 2/0
Don Daglow: Currently don't think he's a head of any development team? But that's what made him famous, so I'll put him as a developer 3/0
Alex Mole: Technical Director 4/0
Celia Hodent: Director of user experience design 5/0
Heather Chandler: Senior Producer 6/0

So, 0 people from PR, 6 developers. Yes, I am the wrong one.
 

Justank

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I'm pretty stoked for Pokemon Go, but I want it to be good so if it's not in a great showing state naturally right now, then by all means just keep working on it. I'd always rather wait than get a crappy product.

Xeorm said:
4455 said:
I'm sorry but you're wrong.
Well now, how can I refute such a stunning rebuttal? I've only talked personally with people upset about how much time was wasted on these things. But lets see: http://www.gdconf.com/conference/production.html with 5 highlighted sessions, each with listed people talking. Wanna guess how many are production people and not PR?

Jonathan Dower: Game Artist 1/0
Mike Acton: Engine Director 2/0
Don Daglow: Currently don't think he's a head of any development team? But that's what made him famous, so I'll put him as a developer 3/0
Alex Mole: Technical Director 4/0
Celia Hodent: Director of user experience design 5/0
Heather Chandler: Senior Producer 6/0

So, 0 people from PR, 6 developers. Yes, I am the wrong one.
10 points to 4455 for being concise. That's 6 to 10, sorry, but you just have to admit defeat at this point Xeorm.

Seriously though, I know some people that worked at Relic back in the DoW days and I've seen behind the scenes type videos from companies showing a lot of prep going into videos/demos strictly made for conferences like this. Gonna have to go with Xeorm on this one.
 

4455

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Feb 7, 2016
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Justank said:
Well now, how can I refute such a stunning rebuttal? I've only talked personally with people upset about how much time was wasted on these things. But lets see: http://www.gdconf.com/conference/production.html with 5 highlighted sessions, each with listed people talking. Wanna guess how many are production people and not PR?

Jonathan Dower: Game Artist 1/0
Mike Acton: Engine Director 2/0
Don Daglow: Currently don't think he's a head of any development team? But that's what made him famous, so I'll put him as a developer 3/0
Alex Mole: Technical Director 4/0
Celia Hodent: Director of user experience design 5/0
Heather Chandler: Senior Producer 6/0

So, 0 people from PR, 6 developers. Yes, I am the wrong one.
I'm sorry, that's wrong.