Back from Austin

If you hadn't guessed by the sudden reappearance of posts, I'm back from Austin.

Austin GDC was ok, but smaller than I'd been lead to beleive. Between meetings, a stint of booth duty, and my own session, I didn't get a chance to attend much.

My session was at the same time as Raph Koster's, which was a drag because (a) I only had 25-ish people show (surprised it was that high) and (b) I wanted to attend Raph's talk! I lucked out Friday at the end of day when David Edery and I met up with Raph and he gave us an up-close-and-personal version of the pitch. Pretty interesting talk, which as Raph points out was taken vastly out of context by the press, but liveblogged pretty well elsewhere.

The Digital Distribution panel that David & Warren Spector were on was entertaining, but I'm not sure anything remarkable was said. The only interesting snippet from the marketing panel in the casual games track was that BigFish (and I quote) spends 30-40% of their revenue on search optimization (a combination of optimising the site and buying keyworks). If that figure is accurate, it's astounding.

Though AGDC was small, it was great for running into people. Aside from those mentioned above, I bumped into Mark and Dante having BBQ, bumped into several old Intel pals, had a brief conversation with Warren, went out for drinks with an acquaintance from Square-Enix from a few years back, saw Jen from Softimage (another ex-matrox compadre), and others.

Oh, and beleive it or not, I think I mildly sprained my elbow playing foosball after a few too many drinks!