Leipzig Roundup

Well it is my final day at the Leipzig Games Convention before heading back to the UK tomorrow. This is my first time at Leipzig and my first time at a convention in my role as Chairman, so I wasn't sure what to expect.

So how has it been?

We had meetings with four publishers and all the meetings went well and we have a clear follow up with all of them, so that's good. At least one unexpected angle came out of the meetings which I am interested in pursuing. Really interested... :)

I learned a lot from the experience of doing short pitching meetings. We have some truly unique features as a games developer and I think I did a good job of putting that all across. What would have been good would have been to get a few more NDAs in place before the event so I could talk more freely about our various prototypes. The life of a small developer is often tough, but it is good to have our approach reinforced. Switching our primary business focus to the traditional developer/publisher model over the more business-to-business games is making the whole process much more straightforward. We are innovating the product rather than the business model.

I also want to send a big thank you to Chris for all his help - you are a star :)

I am definitely planning on coming along next year, though the rumour is the event is moving to Cologne. That is a shame as the Leipzig conference centre is really good, though I think Leipzig as a city might be a bit short of accommodation. We ended up staying some 25km outside of town, which though very pretty, was also in the middle of nowhere :

As for the games, two at the show stood out for me and neither were in our field.

• Fallout 3 was very interesting. I have a horrible suspicion that it will have been console-ised, as the demo didn't show any dialogue. The original Fallout games taught me a lot about how cool it is to have real consequences to your actions in a game. You were never constrained by a polarised good/evil approach - you had to pick your won way through a minefield of shades of behaviour in a world that was damn tough. As for this version - we will have to wait and see, but I am hoping that it will be good.
• Call of Duty: World At War. The original Call of Duty games taught me a lot about how horrific WW2 was, it was like living through the Band of Brothers tv series. That gave me a new level of empathy for my grandfather and his experiences as a paratrooper in the war. This game continues that approach, but excitingly for me, it now offers a 4 player co-operative approach. Co-operative games are one of my most loved forms of gaming, so that's rather exciting.

Now... do I get an XBox 360, or a gaming PC?

Also word to the wise: German wasps are nasty! One crawled into my shirt and stung me 5 times on the arm. I am typing this with my whole upper right arm wrapped in bandages! The German for "I've been stung by a wasp" is: ich bin von einer Wespe gestochen worden.