Microsoft’s Gamefest conference in Seattle is mainly for game developers but a number of panels in Monday’s session also yielded some interesting info for people like myself who are game fans and are interested in how Microsoft plans to promote Windows gaming and game communities in general. One panel was hosted by Skip McIlvaine, the developer relations manager for Microsoft’s Game Technology Group who talked about their plan for the new Windows gaming initiative. McIlvaine said that in a few months Microsoft plans to have some kind of Windows Gaming relaunch that’s similar to what they have done with launches for their Xbox consoles (he did not mention specific dates but we have to think it’s going to be around the time Microsoft launches their Windows Vista OS in January 2007). This launch will not just include things like new logos and branding for Windows game boxes but an all new look for retail stores to sell Windows games, complete with kiosks to play Windows games (a trial run of what that might look like is supposedly on display at the EBWorld store in Microsoft's home town of Redmond, Washington. The recently announced relaunch of Computer Gaming World as the Games for Windows magazine is also a part of that effort.

McIlvaine also talked a bit about what Microsoft is doing to put new and upcoming Windows games in two categories: Essentials and Showcases. Games with the Essentials brand basically do the minimal amount of effort to get Microsoft’s approval for using the Games for Windows brand, which are still fairly high. Among other things they have to support the Xbox 360 controller for Windows, they must support Windows Media Center and they must use the new Windows Game Explorer in Vista. McIlvaine said that Vista will be much more of a gaming OS than Windows 9x or Windows XP since for one thing there will be a games section right when the user hits the start menu button. Direct3D must also be the primary graphics driver. McIlvaine did mention that Open GL will also be supported for Vista natively as well but as you might imagine they are making their own DirectX driver their primary focus for Windows games in Vista.

McIlvaine also talked some more about the Windows Game Explorer aspect of Vista, particularly the way it will be using the ESRB ratings system. People with admin access to Vista will be able to not only lock out kids from playing any “M” rated game loaded onto the PC but also lock out games that may have content descriptions like “blood’ or “violence” that the game has listed even if the game is rated as something their kids would normally have access to playing. He also talked about how Vista will ease installing games such as eliminating the number of dialog screens that a person will have to flip through to get the game on their PC hard drive.

While PC games within the Essentials category will have high standards, games under the Showcases banner will have to strive even harder to get more marketing and push from Microsoft. Among those requirements are supporting the upcoming DirectX10, native support for 64-bit and multi-core processors and using error reporting in order to find and fix game bugs. Indeed, McIlvaine is recommending that game developers and publishers abandon support for Windows 9x games altogether for future titles simply because bug reports for games that run natively in Windows XP and Vista will drop enormously. Games that take less than three clicks to install and support DVD-ROM drives exclusively will also get Showcase support for Microsoft. This is because Vista will only support DVD-Rom drives; there will be no native CD-Rom support for the new OS. Finally games that do cool stuff like use multi-monitors like the upcoming Supreme Commander and have new and unique gameplay will likely get the Showcase banner.

There are other things like McIlvaine said Microsoft is working on for PC games, including more support for digital distribution of games and their support of Live Anywhere, their plan to integrate Windows gaming with Xbox 360 and mobile gaming via matchmaking between the platforms and having Vista and Xbox 360 owners play against each other. While we didn’t attend this panel, we read a Gamefest PowerPoint presentation on Microsoft’s plans for Live Anywhere where Shadowrun and the Halo 2 PC Vista port will be a part of at the launch sometime in 2007. By the 2007 holiday season, Microsoft hopes to have “8-10 first class titles” supported through Live Anywhere. The Windows Game Guide will look similar to the Xbox 360 UI under Live Anywhere with support for things that Xbox 360 gamers already have including gamer tags and cards, achievements, friends lists and more.

Yet another panel we attended Monday discussed creating a user community around a game or games and how that ultimately helps the bottom line in spurring new sales of games. The panel was hosted by Microsoft’s Community and Partner Development Manager Brett Schnepf who used an unusual way to describe his thinking about game community management; the Ronnie Van Zandt school of management. Schnepf used examples of how the lead singer and head man behind the country rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd handled both the group’s business and their fans to give them longevity. Schenepf said that the band never became bigger than one person on board and that is how game developers should also view their products. Lynyrd Skynyrd also knew their audience and what they wanted and that Microsoft also goes to their fans to find out what they wanted. For their upcoming Flight Simulator X project the team goes to a lot of air shows and events. Schnepf said that one rather wealthy Flight Simulator fan person came up to him at one event and told him that he was building a full Boeing 777 plane mock up as a 3,000 square foot extension to his home, all for getting the ultimate experience in playing a $50 PC product.

Flight Simulator X will be released in early October and among the other new features is the ability to not only be a pilot or co-pilot for a plane but to also be an air traffic controller. In a promo trailer it showed a woman with a head-set talking to other human players online guiding them to their takeoffs and landings. While the game is coming out before the release of Windows Vista and DirectX10, there are plans for a free upgrade to have the game support the new OS and graphics API once both are launched. The Deluxe version will also come with the game’s full SDK for people to make their own mods. Also for the first time will be actual single player missions, something you would expect from a combat flight sim but not for a commercial aviation game.

Also at the panel were Microsoft’s Xbox Live Director of Programming Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb and Epic Games Vice-President Mark Rein where both talked about extending the community in games. At the moment, fans pretty much have to use PC forums, web sites and blogs to start a community and Hryb was asked when or even if such features might be added to Xbox Live. Hryb said that something along those lines was in the works but would not comment further. Rein said that he feels establishing a mod community for games like their own Unreal and Unreal Tournament series was a good way to extend the life of titles by offering new downloadable content and free mod tools for games. Rein and Hryb had a friendly debate at the panel over which approach was better for releasing new content; do you release that kind of add-on for free in hopes of getting more copies of your original game sold in stores or do you charge for that kind of an add-on product and gain revenue that perhaps you might be able to get otherwise? It’s still something of a new direction for console games. Hryb said that there is a vocal minority that is opposed to charging for add-on content via Xbox Live but Rein feels that ultimately that could limit your audience.

While we didn’t attend this panel we saw a Gamefest Pointpoint presentation on how Xbox Live Marketplace is working for the Xbox 360 and they claim that at least 3 Xbox 360 titles have generated over $1 million in revenue via paid add-on downloads (we know at least one of them to be Call of Duty 2 thanks to figures supplied by its publisher Activision a couple of weeks ago). The slide said that the timing of releasing the add-ons was a key to their success and that developers and publishers should release such add-ons within 60 to 90 days after the release of the main game. However the presentation also indicates that free demos for games can also spur more people to purchase the final product depending on when the demo is released. Fight Night Round 3 had a 40 percent conversion rate among people who downloaded the demo, according to the presentation, and that currently each demo is averaging over 250,000 downloads with Prey getting over 300,000 downloads in one week. Indeed, a demo is downloaded two to five times more than a simple game trailer for the same game.

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