The Austin Game Conference is on!

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NEWS:

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The Austin Game Conference is on!

The 2005 Austin Game Conference starts tomorrow (October 27), and continues Friday at the Austin Convention Center.

Related conference events (the Game Technology Association meeting, Khronos Developer University, Women's Game Conference, Game Writers Conference) actually started today, with the latter two continuing through tomorrow.

The conference looks even more feature packed than last year, with some impressive speakers, a big recruiting event the Technology Pavilion, and even more diverse tracks than last year:

• AGC Games in Asia Track (Oct. 28 only)
• AGC Multiplayer Business/Production Track
• AGC Multiplayer Design Track
• AGC Multiplayer Tech/Art Track
• AGC Multiplayer Service & Support Track
• AGC Mobile and Wireless Design and Profits Track
• AGC Future of the Development Pipeline
• AGC Next Generation Game Development

Microsoft's Xbox 360 is the conference sponsor this year, but I'm noticing a big Sony contingent (11 high-caliber speakers, versus 5 Microsoft's), which I find interesting ...

And a talented buddy of mine, Adam Langley, will be the emcee for Thursday night's kick-off party, sponsored by K2 Network. Make sure and support Adam -- the dude rocks.

I, unfortunately, will likely not be there, due to a bunch o' factors:

1. Life stuff (life happens, can't be helped)
2. My prioritizing the toy job over this (which sucks, because they didn't make a reciprocal prioritization for me), and
3. A bit o' sour grapes

The sour grapes thing stems (<snicker/>) from my trying to get a hold of a specific person regarding refund policies for a certain life situation (see #1 above), and not getting a response. Which made me go back to the last year-plus of attempted interactions with specific Austin Game Conference and Austin Game Initiative folks -- not general mailboxes -- and I realized I've never gotten the courtesy of response of any kind from these folks (even when the request was for things like buying conference audio and the like). Given professionalism is a huge deal to me, this rubs me the wrong way.

Be that as it may, I wish I could go the next couple of days -- not attending something like this for a voice actor who loves video games is a bit of a kick in the teeth. Plus I miss out on meeting new and very cool folks, and catching up with folks I met last year.

Ah well. For fun, check out my last year's summary of the conference:

• Day 1
• Day 2