This monday, June 22., I attended the GAMESplaces International 2009 Conference in Frankfurt am Main. Here are the bits I found interesting:

Nintendos ways of marketing the Wii and the DS to women.

Silja Gülicher (Senior Assistant Manager PR Nintendo Europe, GER) presented two cases in which Nintendo targeted women in a different way.

1. Based on the insight that 60% of the book sales in book store today are to women, Nintendo approached several book stores to sell Nintendo DS games (the software) in their stores. After adding the DS hardware to the offering, the sales of the software and hardware went up considerably. Some book stores even have “Nintendo corners” now.

2. Nintendo talked to Tupperware to include the Wii and Wii Fit in their “Home Parties”. Nintendo would take the Wii where the women are and Tupperware would have a product to attract a younger audience. Tupperware agreed and Nintendo sold hundreds of Wii units this way.

The Keynote presentation style

Jason Della Rocca presented his keynote “The evolving games industry ecosystem” in a very interesting form. He drew most of his presentation slides with an stylus and a tablet live on stage. This had a very honest and being part of the process feeling to it.

He sees the games industrie adopting the “google model” of launching products/games in beta and evolve them over time to reduce the risks of game development.

What was missing

Besides talking about the latest technical advances in CPUs, GPUs the conference lacked any news or visions of future interface for playing games. Everybody seemed fixed on the status quo using games-controllers, keyboards and mice. Location aware and augmented reality games, with posible new interfaces on mobiles have not been mentioned at all.

Most of the talks should posted as podcast in the coming days or weeks as it has been in the previous years.

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