Last night I went to the Boston Post Mortem meeting. This is a monthly gathering of game developers in the Boston area. I like to go because I usually run into people I know. Last night we heard the pitch from Gene Mauro, CEO and founder of Capital Entertainment Group. Seamus Blakely (aka. Mr. XBox) is also a founder. The model sounds interesting. Basically they plan to front the risk of development by splitting it with a publisher. They spend the money to develop titles, then shop completed games to publishers. The shield the developer from publishing companies, and publishing companies from production. He claimed that while there are way too many games being published, there is also not much innovation because of the risk involved. Publishers aren't willing to fund a 15 million dollar game if its not pretty sure it will sell - so they go for sequels, licenses, etc. and no originality.
I also ran into Paul Neurath, the former president of Looking Glass Technologies. His new company (so new there is no website yet??) is making games for Pocket PCs, doing converstions of old PC games. "Ultima Underworld runs better than it ever did on the PC", he said. I might just have to pick that one up and check it out. The amazing thing is that this was one of my business ideas about 4 years ago - when I first heard of Windows CE. I pitched it to THQ and they didn't bite.
