GDC 2011 day one bulletin - everything you need to know
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Head inside for the full story on GDC 2011's first day, including details from the show's indie track and some stealth announces from Valve and Tecmo.
GDC 2011 is officially underway, with the show now having completed its first day with some indie sessions and a few early announcements. The show proper gets going on Wednesday with the Iwata keynote on the last 25 years in games.
You can get a full breakdown of what's happening this week in San Francisco here. While you're rubbing the sleep out of your eyes, though, here's what happened on GDC day one.
- Tecmo used the quiet first day of GDC to drop Ninja Gaiden 3's first teaser video, confirming a 2012 date for the slasher. This is the first in the second NG series not to be overseen by producer Tomonobu Itagaki.
- Valve also fired off some early big guns last night, announcing a TV mode for Steam and lifting a Portal 2 preview embargo for selected press.
- The PC Gaming Alliance, despite recently losing founding members Nvidia and Microsoft, has launched a new report at GDC this week, saying PC gaming revenue rose 20 percent to $16.2 billion in 2010.
- Rovio's Angry Birds session included confirmation that a full-length animated movie based on the IP is in the works. Rovio also said that a St Patrick's Day pack is to be released for the mobile game.
- Zynga's said speed is key to making games very popular. Farmville, apparently, was all about "doing the minimum to get the game out the door.”
- Team Meat's been moaning about Microsoft back-tracking on promotional promises related to the XBLA launch of Super Meat Boy. The game's sold 400,000 units, the bulk of sales coming from Steam. Team Meat's now in receipt of 3DS dev kits.
- Wolfire Games founder Jeffrey Rosen told GDC yesterday that the key to the success of the Humble Bundle - a charity pack sold at a user-set price - was to "click the buy button, get an email, and download your games.” No argument there.
- Riot Games slagged off beta testing in the League of Legends postmortem yesterday, saying instead that it instigated a triage system of internal testing to ready builds. "Beta cannot be about finding critical or major bug," said senior producer Steve Snow.
Here's the audio. You now know what happened at GDC yesterday. Well done.