DEVELOPERS BLOG

BlackBerry Jam Direct: Taking Your Game to the Next Level Recap

ANNOUNCEMENTS / 07.26.13 / saml8

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Yesterday marked the first ever BlackBerry® Jam Direct virtual conference. This inaugural event was focused on game development and helping developers take their mobile game business to the next level. Over 650 developers were exposed to topics varying from how games can benefit their customers to industry trends to gamer psychology and basic table stakes for games. This conference showed developers how to think differently about gaming and to spot trends that will set them up for success in the future.

We were incredibly lucky to be joined by Jane McGonigal, a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games and New York Times bestselling author. Jane spoke about a new way of thinking when she took the virtual stage for a keynote presentation.

“I’m so glad I had the chance to share new research from the psychology of gaming with the BlackBerry developer community. It’s really important to me that game developers have access to cutting-edge scientific research about how games impact our brains and our emotions. It gives them the power to create games that have a positive impact on players’ real lives,” said McGonigal. “The virtual conference was a really fun opportunity for me to debut some new ideas, and also to hear from mobile game developers all over the world about what they’re dealing with every day as they try to create amazing games.”

BlackBerry Global Head of Gaming; Anders Jeppsson also hosted an insightful panel discussion with several industry leaders in gaming.

“BlackBerry remains committed to developer success,” said Jeppsson. “Our support does not end once the game hits the store– we’re about continued growth and longevity. We want to partner with developers to ignite new ideas, define direction and build successful businesses”.

Numerous game developers have seen great success on BlackBerry and here’s what they had to say:

“At 10tons we love to bring our games to as many platforms as possible. With BlackBerry we’ve easily covered our porting costs and more, even though the user base is relatively small when compared to the bigger platforms. This is because porting the games is relatively easy and we’ve received great support from the people at BlackBerry.”

– Sampo Toyssy, 10tons- Sparkle 2

“I’ve supervised the process of porting all of our mobile titles to BlackBerry’s newest devices. I have to say that the experience was great! Programming did not take much time, submission was extremely easy and well-organized (thanks to the ticket system) and verification itself is done in a matter of a day or two. What is more you have a really great staff working for you – the contact with those guys is great. Thumbs up all around!”

– Stan Just, Producer, 11bit studios- Anomaly Warzone Earth HD

“We have been pleasantly surprised at how well we are monetizing our freemium games on BlackBerry 10. The amount of revenue we generate per user is higher than that of other platforms. In addition, the BlackBerry 10 SDK is a dream come true for game developers. We were able to port our technology to the platform within a matter of days. We will definitely be developing more games for BlackBerry 10 in the future.”

– Mark Ng, Co-Founder, Clapfoot Inc – Sector Strike

“Working with BlackBerry has been a great experience for Free Lunch Design. Their passion and commitment to gaming and game developers reflect in their solid technology and the BlackBerry World storefront offering. We look forward to continuing to work with them for all of our upcoming titles”

– Magnus Alm, CEO, Free Lunch Design

“We love how fast it was to get our technology up and running on BlackBerry, it literally took less than 24 hours to get most of our tech up and running on the Native BlackBerry SDK. We are very excited about BBM coming to other platforms, we already support Scoreloop cross-platform and we can now add social integration via BBM as well”.

– Daniel Jeppsson, Founder, Funkoi- Alpha Zero

“As independent game developers we’re excited to be bringing all of our present and upcoming titles to BlackBerry 10.A lot of what’s in BlackBerry is based on common languages and tools, and most game developers will actually find it very easy to work with. Great developer relations and one of the most active and welcoming communities out there make the development for BlackBerry even more enticing.”

– David Peroutka, Director, Hexage Ltd- Radiant Defense

“We now have five of our titles on the BlackBerry World store including KAMI RETRO our highly acclaimed puzzle platformer and the most recent Paw Print Games title, Swashbuckler, which is a pirate based platforming adventure game staring Julius the iconic monkey from the Paul Frank fashion brand. We are currently working on an exciting new title that will make use of some of the features exclusively available on the BlackBerry 10 hardware and look forward to sharing more details with you soon.”

– Antony White, Director, Paw Print Games Ltd- Swashbuckler

“BlackBerry 10 was a joy to develop for. It supports all the required standards, most importantly OpenGL ES. Their Developer Support team is very friendly and is always ready to help with any problems.”

– Alexander Kiselyov, Chief Executive Officer, PlayCreek LLC – Death Worm

“Working with BlackBerry has been a great experience. We’ve developed games for both BlackBerry 10 and PlayBook over the last few years and this has proved to be a very fruitful relationship. Our contact at BlackBerry has been prompt at dealing with any development issues we had by both providing hardware and expertise in a timely manner. The Native development suite has matured into a robust tool that allows us to create games entirely in C++ without the pain of additional coding on the non-native side.”

– Steven Haggerty, Rubicon- Great Big War Game

“BlackBerry provides mobile game developers a comprehensive API and toolset that allows almost effortless portability of most open libraries and mobile gaming codebases. Couple that with excellent support and very respectable revenues, and it should be a no-brainer for mobile game devs, big and small, to add BlackBerry to their platform portfolio.”

– Stephane Jacoby, Chief Technology Officer, Square One Games- The Bard’s Tale

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