Well, the get-together was not quite as well attended this time, although the people that did attend made it an interesting talk anyway.  The low attendence probably shouldn’t have been too surprising: the reason we originally pushed the July meeting back to the 14th in the first place was because of the number of people who were going to busy or unavailable due to the holiday, after all.

Some details after the jump…

Location

Kip’s was a decent location overall.  I took a couple quick shots of the room…

The Molly Room at Kips The Molly Room at Kips shot 2

The temperature got a bit chilly after a while, but overall, the venue was sufficient.  Food and drink were readily available, unlike last time: a definite plus.

Discussion

Brent from Virgin Worlds and Jonathon Stevens from Last Straw Games were the two attendees besides myself.  I should mention that both dragged themselves over despite a lack of sleep the night before: “hard-core” is possibly a bit mild in terms of describing these two gentlemen…

The discussion this time focussed largely on the business and technical elements of the biz: we started with some discussion of what we’ve each been doing, different games we’ve been watching, playing, keeping an eye on, and quickly touched on pricing models, industry events and news of various kinds, blogging and bloggers, business and financial tidbits that people have run across at various times (the comparative price of advertising in various ways at some of the dev conferences, for example).

Brent related a little of his experience setting up the Virgin Worlds podcast collective, and Jonathon talked about organizing the IMGDC and some of his plans for next year’s event.  We discussed (read: “mildly disagreed” 🙂 ) about the use of various operating systems, programming languages, and database packages for various purposes, with a focus on MMO servers, of course.  Cost of acquisition vs. cost of operation/support, which performance measures are more or less important, and so on. 

We also talked a bit about some of the technical aspects of podcasting, what various people are using for recording, editing, mixing, and so on, in terms of hardware and software.  (Brent’s covered all of that in his recent podcast #70, give it a listen if you’re interested in details.)

Conclusion

It was, of course, a bit disappointing that more people couldn’t make it, but I hope that is more indicative of the specifics of the timing than lack of interest.  The July 14th event is still planned and on schedule, and Brent even kindly offered (subject to circumstances, of course) to host one of the subsequent future events as a backyard barbecue at his home, if there was interest.

We have some 20 people signed up now at meetup.com, and 8 “yes” RSVPs for the next meeting, including several of the new people.  I hope to meet all of you on the 14th!