A great indicator of growth in this industry is how healthy new game development is. At the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this spring, I was blown away by the energy and the large number of people there. This year a record 19,000 people attended GDC.
We set out to meet some quality game developers and learn more about trends from big names as well as indie game developers. Here are three trends that seemed to become thematic for the entire event, and that we think will color how the rest of 2011 will play out.
1. HTML5 vs. Apps as Future Games Platform
HTML5 is getting closer and closer to prime time, and those of us who are betting big on the 
browser-based gaming experience can expect to see even more big developments this year. Many game developers are looking to HTML5 and the standards behind it to solve the growing problems of mobile device and platform fragmentation. Plus, with hundreds of thousands of apps flooding the mobile app stores, discoverability is becoming an expensive, and almost insurmountable challenge.
At GDC, the Khronos Group announced the release of their final WebGL 1.0 specification, which enables hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in HTML5-compatible web browsers, without requiring plug-ins. Khronos reports that WebGL “defines a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES 2.0 to allow rich 3D graphics within a browser on any platform supporting the industry-standard OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics APIs.” Their graphics library makes the most of the “pervasive availability” of OpenGL ES 2.0 on a variety of desktop, mobile, and embedded platforms. Khronos believes that the ability for web developers to access OpenGL-class graphics straight from Javascript, and mix 3D with other HTML content will enable a “new wave of innovation in web gaming, educational and training applications and graphically rich user interfaces to make the web more enjoyable, productive and intuitive.”
It’s clear from announcements such as these and others at GDC that HTML5 is bringing a rich, app-like UI, design and interactivity to the mobile web. Now that the masses are starting to consume mobile content regularly, we expect to see more games developed for HTML5 including popular titles from the likes of EA, Zynga and other high profile developers.
