We’ve been following GDC’s Serious Games Summit, and the Serious Game portal has just posted about emerging trends in the serious games market as evident from the summit presentations and discussions. You can view the article here.
| They point to three key trend areas | |
| 1. | Early Prototyping |
| 2. | Market Shift – New Demands |
| 3. | Hybrids Studios and Hybrid Games |
We’ve been interested and dabbling in developing casual games for learning, and the information from GDC validates some of our trend spotting.
As strong believers in early prototyping, we know the customers and developers benefits from being able to play-test our games way before they are actually ready for learners. It’s an excellent way for clients to get familiar with the game mechanics, interfaces and interaction and provide constructive feedback.
The market demands lower cost of development, and we are attempting to develop games that the market can afford. Casual game engines with tools for content development will significantly lower the cost of development and deployment of content specific games. We’d like to think of it as the first step towards an authoring environment for learning games.
We’ve long foreseen the entry of entertainment game developers/publishers into the serious games market. In addition to bringing powerful and sophisticated development tools to the market, they will also bring the strong production values of recreational gaming in serious games. Either way, the serious games market stands to gain much from this trend.
