The New York Gaming Meetup is a monthly networking event for professionals in the game industry in and around New York City. Now in it’s second year of existence, the NY Gaming Meetup has featured a wide variety of demos from up-and-coming start-ups like regular presenter Miharo Games to some of the most successful NY-area tech companies in recent memory, such as Foursquare.
At the meetup this past Monday, the theme was mobile gaming. With a guest list of roughly 95 developers, investors, CEOs, marketers, journalists and industry aspirants, March was one of the group’s best months ever.
As bi-coastal members of the games industry, we were able to take some of the trends we saw out at GDC10 last week in San Francisco and apply those lessons to the demos and ideas shared at the NY Meetup. The #1 trend in mobile gaming that we took notice of is “app discovery.”
With 25,000+ games on the App Store and dozens of editorial sites reviewing these games, where should consumers look for unbiased opinions? The App Store’s own user reviews provide a guide but lack credibility and authority. Simple screenshots and text descriptions don’t tell the full story of what a game is like to play.
We presented a demo of The Game Trail, a new iPhone tool that aids iPhone game shoppers with app discovery. Addressing a deficiency in the app store, The Game Trail offers video trailers and a selection of video reviews from independent sources all in a simple free app. The feedback on this app that we received from members of the NY Gaming Meetup was insightful and valuable, proving that the collaborative community nature of the meetup group is the ideal place to debut new technology, games and ideas.
Next month’s theme is social gaming and the featured presenter will be Kenny Rosenblatt, CEO of Arkadium. If you work in or around the games industry or just have a penchant for drinking with fellow geeks, we recommend you sign up and come out on April 13th, 2010.
The NY Gaming Meetup is free and takes place at Gallery Bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
TriplePoint is a sponsor of the NY Gaming Meetup
