Final day at GCAP pushes the practical side of publishing / developing

GCAP has now drawn to a close, with day three having some great speeches and panels on the state of the local industry and successful game marketing.

The highlights included an opening keynote by Jesse Divnich from EEDAR discussing the need for developers to stop thinking of their role as being to make videogames, and start thinking about creating brands. Of course, the room full of developers and aspiring developers may not have been fully ready to hear about commercial realities, but Divnich's ability to draw lines of cause and effect between seemingly innocuous tenets of the industry and its products was fantastic.

The recently announced R&D tax incentive got a workshop designed to help people understand how and when they can claim on the new federal government program to receive reimbursement.

Espresso Communications' Corrie McLeod (responsible for iGEA PR) spoke on the Aussie PR process, Jens Shroeder from Qantm College philosophising on technicity and cultural capital, Phil Larsen from Halfbrick on positinging new titles, and guest Jim Willson from Konami discussing the roles and responsibilities of developers and publishers once they're working with one another.

One great panel had representatives from Epic Games, Microsoft, Tantalus and Konami's Willson describing in great detail why the Australian games industry was far from dead, and why sensationalistic journalism may have been responsible for that perception.

Rounding out the day was a final keynote by Amir Rao from Supergiant Games, who cleverly converted the entire development of Bastion (the XBLA title known for its strong and unique narrator) into a tale to tell a captivated audience, before the whole event was wrapped up at an afterparty at the Melbourne Mana Bar.

Stay tuned for more follow-up articles and in-depth discussions from GCAP 2011 throughout the coming days.

Image courtesy of i R Media.

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