Thanks to everyone who came out last Thursday evening for the first Game Central Meet ‘em Up, we were thrilled by the turn out (not so thrilled that we ran out of chairs, but will fix this for next time).

Kicking off the evening’s talks was Paul Taylor from indie developers  Mode 7 talking about the marketing and festival work for their upcoming release Frozen Synapse, followed by Sian Evans from Activision on the marketing campaign for DJ Hero.

Although it was unsurprising to hear them talk of the extensive gulf between the budgets for DJ Hero and Frozen Synapse there were still parallels between their approaches, and food for thought came from both indie and triple A campaigns.

The two topics that generated a lot of discussion were the value of having good assets and understanding how to time their release in order to keep an audience engaged. As well as knowing when an asset was ready to be released, what was the fine line between not too raw but not too polished (“impressive but not yet awesome“)… enough to have an impact, yet still with room to gain feedback from?

Secondly was how essential it is to have a personable/ charismatic developer who knows a game inside out to stay with a game throughout the marketing and release campaign. Even if this means loosing a key developer for several months from a future title.

So far we’ve had some good feedback from the evening, and if you were there we’d love to hear from you to help us improve the events in future. The next Meet ‘em Up will be in late January 2010 and we’ll be posting details of this shortly, please sign up to the newsletter to be the first to find out of this.