Orbus Gameworks

GDC 2009 Talk... Rejected. Ouch.

Oct 1, 09:45 AM

So I, along with Todd Northcutt of IGN, submitted a joint talk to the 2009 Game Developers Conference. They had a new submission process this year: short submission for a first cut, and then a long submission to make second cut.

I was pretty sure that we would at least make first cut. This is because our presentation was going to be chock full of real data that IGN has collected on top-tier multiplayer games like Command & Conquer 3 and Unreal Tournament 3. IGN did the collecting, and earlier this year, Orbus Gameworks did a bunch of analysis on their data.

As part of the submission, I even sent along some sample data. “Hey, look guys! This is juicy stuff! You know, the sort of real data everyone wishes they could be privvy to but nobody ever shows in public? We will show that data.“

Oh yeah, and I give talks at many CMP conferences, including GDC, and I consistently score in the 4.7 out of 5.0 range: a good 0.8 points above the average. So they know I’m a good speaker, and I even took the time to point that out in the application.

Real data + AAA games + consistently good speaker = awesome. Right?

Apparently not awesome enough for GDC.

Perhaps we were rejected because CMP knows that IGN will pony up for a sponsored session. But I made it really clear in the submission that this talk was not going to be about IGN technology, but player behavior.

Maybe we were rejected because someone else had some even cooler metrics to show. I’d be okay with that.

But honestly I have no idea what the actual guidelines are. In related news, Adam Martin has some excellent suggestions for improving conferences, including ways that conference organizers might be able to provide feedback on rejected talks without spending too many man-hours on it.

— Darius Kazemi