business & legal track - a look into the business and legalities of building and running MMOGs

 Community Issues Workshop (Tami Baribeau, Scott Hartsman, Ron Meiners, Katie Postma) - Panel 

This panel will focus on various community issues with a few different views from the panelists.

Client Support Without Going Bankrupt (Eric Rhea) - Round Table 

At last you launched your title! Players came and conquered. Only, they didn't arrive in what you expected, or worse, they're using an operating system that didn't exist in your development cycle. You discover one fateful morning that it costs real money to support people, to purchase that off brand hardware and software configurations to test on so that you can put an end to those customer confidence lowering forum posts. Then, there are the in-game bugs that didn't exist until your players started getting, how shall we say, "creative". Now is the moment of truth. Can you financially survive these shark infested waters of end user support for a title you spent two or more years in a cave producing? Let's find out how.

Government Interference: How Much Can you Take? (Dr. Richard Bartle) - Round Table 

A series of very short scenarios of government regulations and controversies followed by discussions in a round-table format.

Building a Better EULA (Erin Hoffman) Round Table 

This rountable will target the good and the bad of the End User License Agreements of today and tomorrow.

Self-Sufficiency: Generating Revenue as an Indie (Serafina Pechan) - Session 

If an independents goal is to be self-sufficient, then figuring out a way to generate revenue is essential. We will discuss ways to generate revenue from a product long before it releases. This is also a discussion about the different avenues for generating early development money including: investment, creative financing, contracting, begging, and a few secrets I have up my sleeve.

Independent Development: The Future of MMOGs (Gordon Walton) - Session

Independent development will be the creative fount and the largest opportunity space for massively multiplayer game development in the coming decade. This talk will explore the opportunities that independents can exploit that mainstream publishers will be blind to as they chase the WOW customers.

MMOG Law: The Wild West or New World Order (Lawrence Walters) - Session 

This Session will focus on identifying the current and future hot button legal issues pertaining to development and play of MMORPG’s. The presenter will illustrate these issues with both hypothetical cases and actual legal disputes pending in the courts. Attendees will leave the Session with a broad understanding of the legal landscape as it pertains to MMORPG’s – both from an ‘in game’ perspective, and from a development stance.

What key factors driving Chinese people into online games? (Yifan Li) - Session 

Looking into Chinese internet market, I have found a very strange thing: many world-level online game products, such as Everquest and Shadowbane, can’t succeed in China. While some third-class products, such as the Legend of Mir 2, can get success in China. Why? This problem invokes my research interests. Probably the driving factors attracting Chinese players into online games are very different from other countries.