For those that develop games and are going to the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco next week be sure to go to the Director-related session. It will be held on Wednesday March 25, 2009 from 10:30-11:30am. The session description says:
Allen Partridge, Adobe Systems, hosts professional 3D game developers Pieter Albers and Diederick Groesbeek, Xform Games, Malachy Duffin, CanDo Interactive, Steve Becerra and Richard Chala, Mockworld, and David Mullich, Spin Master demonstrating & discussing design and development strategies for creating profitable, high-performance games for the web. Topics include technology challenges, design approach, business advantage & browser-based 3D.
I wonder if Director 11.5 will get shown at that time? Hmm…fits in well with the April 4th shipping date on Amazon.
March 15th, 2009
This past week a FOSE 2009 took place. I’m not sure what FOSE stands for but the event was a technology tradeshow and conference for government IT. Someone from Adobe was speaking and said that there are about 200,000 Director developers.
Is that number larger than you thought? Smaller? Needless to say, this sparked a bit of discussion on the Direct-L mailing list this week. Does the number indicate “active” developers? People that occasionally use Director to maintain old content? Hard to say.
Several people that run sites talked about their stats*, and that brought up more issues. I personally know that stats can “show” most anything you choose. Using Google stats you can at least be sure you have the same program doing the analysis. 🙂
German Directorforum
Absolute Unique Visitors: 290,512 (1 year)
International Directorforum
Absolute Unique Visitors: 22,195 (11 months since launch)
Dean’s Director Tutorials
Absolute Unique Visitors: almost 65,000 (1 year)
And here at Director @ Night
Absolute Unique Visitors: 18,484 (11 months, was down for 1 month)
So what does this mean? Hard to say. I do know that this site does very little, but I still get visitors. I’d love to see stats on the Adobe Forums. Personally I think the 200k number is a bit high, but I would be willing to go with 100k. The bigger item of interest (to us Director developers) will be what happens to this number in the next few years as the new versions of Director get released. Amazon still shows Director 11.5 for April 4th. Adobe has been at the Game Developers Conference the past two years, so marketing is increasing. I even saw an ad for Director on my gmail page.
So are there 200,000 Director developers out there? As a Magic 8-ball might say, “Ask again later.”
*Stats are from Martin and Dean on Direct-L
March 15th, 2009