I think it cost $300, but mine was paid for. If it wasn't I would have gone anyway as I have a friend there I wanted to see. He'll also put me up for a night or two.
Just booked a return flight from Exeter for £140 including baggage, taxes etc. My partner will drop me off so no car parking charge. It was only £90 from Bristol but it's an extra 45 mins drive which adds up to time lost and fuel cost (my car costs about 20p per mile and the extra milage would be 120 miles = £24). The flights are mid afternoon which is perfect - I just flew to Austria a week ago at 6am! youch, it was painful as I had to get up at 2am.
I'm mainly going to meet the BFG people as I'm about to finalise a new contract with them, but I'll also "hob nob" at some of the other big portals so they'll hopefully remember me when if I email them. Got some new Grey Alien Games business cards made up too. Plus, as I said, some of the presentations sound very intersting and up my street.
I'm going on Tuesday and will go to the conference on Wed/Thu and Fri morning (yeah not much on friday interests me either except for maybe the Peggle Case Study on Steam, and Passion vs Financial and maybe Viral Game Marketing and Outsourcing done right (which seems to be more about distributed teams which I basically am part of).
Other things I'm interested in (this is a reduced list): Character Cash (how characters are important in casual games), 0-101 Games for Everyone (not just ladies 35-55), Dream Weaving (about Dream Chronicles which is a genre I'm interested in) or maybe Getting on Real Arcade (on at the same time), Contract Negotiation, Hype vs Real Deal (sounds cool, a panel answers questions about casual game "buzz" topics), Hints in games, Sounds Workshop, Let me Win (work with the player not against them). Yeah that's pretty much it, I have a few more "maybes" like about advertising and internation stuff but they don't interest me as much, I'm still into game "design" more than the whole marketing thing. A good game will sell itself to a certain extent and also BFG know how to do all the marketing stuff anyway.
Just booked a return flight from Exeter for £140 including baggage, taxes etc. My partner will drop me off so no car parking charge. It was only £90 from Bristol but it's an extra 45 mins drive which adds up to time lost and fuel cost (my car costs about 20p per mile and the extra milage would be 120 miles = £24). The flights are mid afternoon which is perfect - I just flew to Austria a week ago at 6am! youch, it was painful as I had to get up at 2am.
I'm mainly going to meet the BFG people as I'm about to finalise a new contract with them, but I'll also "hob nob" at some of the other big portals so they'll hopefully remember me when if I email them. Got some new Grey Alien Games business cards made up too. Plus, as I said, some of the presentations sound very intersting and up my street.
I'm going on Tuesday and will go to the conference on Wed/Thu and Fri morning (yeah not much on friday interests me either except for maybe the Peggle Case Study on Steam, and Passion vs Financial and maybe Viral Game Marketing and Outsourcing done right (which seems to be more about distributed teams which I basically am part of).
Other things I'm interested in (this is a reduced list): Character Cash (how characters are important in casual games), 0-101 Games for Everyone (not just ladies 35-55), Dream Weaving (about Dream Chronicles which is a genre I'm interested in) or maybe Getting on Real Arcade (on at the same time), Contract Negotiation, Hype vs Real Deal (sounds cool, a panel answers questions about casual game "buzz" topics), Hints in games, Sounds Workshop, Let me Win (work with the player not against them). Yeah that's pretty much it, I have a few more "maybes" like about advertising and internation stuff but they don't interest me as much, I'm still into game "design" more than the whole marketing thing. A good game will sell itself to a certain extent and also BFG know how to do all the marketing stuff anyway.