Digital Media: Austin

So I’ve been pretty busy with work and going back to school and I totally have forgotten to talk about the Austin GDC. It’s been going on since Wednesday and ends today. Gamasutra has a live coverage page dedicated to the conference so check it out.

As usual it looks like one of the major topics is funding for game development. Online Alchemy’s Craig Fryar spoke about alternative funding for online game development. The usual suspects were discussed. However, one source that I think very few online developers have even thought about tapping are interactive marketing firms and agencies that have a pipeline into large corporate marketing budgets.

Now of course these developers wouldn’t get as much creative control of a game but they never will as long as someone else is doing the funding. Utilizing the marketing agencies could provide a steady stream of revenue that could allow a smaller studio to survive and eventually generate enough cash to fund its own game.

Currently I haven’t seen many indy game developers try and tap into what I think is a gold mine. More and more large corporations are shifting ad spend to online. I’ve read recent reports, which of course I can’t track down now, that online ad spend will overtake all other media in roughly 2012 or so. Surely there is a piece of that pie that can be exploited by game developers.