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David Perry has made some of the biggest games played on traditional video game consoles, such as The Matrix and Messiah. But the creative officer at Acclaim said at the DICE Summit today that he’ll never develop another single-player game again.
The reason is that there are so many opportunities for small teams to make free [...]

David Perry has made some of the biggest games played on traditional video game consoles, such as The Matrix and Messiah. But the creative officer at Acclaim said at the DICE Summit today that he’ll never develop another single-player game again.

The reason is that there are so many opportunities for small teams to make free online games (dubbed free-to-play) that are supported by virtual goods sales or advertising. This was just one of the many topics that Perry, who is also an industry consultant game company investor, talked about in a whirlwind speech about the edges of innovation in the game industry.

Perry said he traveled to China with Acclaim chief executive Howard Marks and was stunned to see so many games in development there where the business model is to give away an online game for free and charge for micro transactions. One of Acclaim’s new games is Ponystars, a free-to-play game targeted at girls. Already, more than 600,000 players, mostly young girls, have registered to play. Only a small percentage of players actually engage in micro-transactions (buying, for example, upgrades for their ponies), but those that do will spend as much as $70.

While Perry serves as the creative force behind many of Acclaim’s games, such as Rockfree, he is also wealthy from having built and sold Shiny Entertainment, which made games such as The Matrix. Hence, he is one of the most active investors in the industry and believes passionately in introducing game investors and game developers, which he does through his site GameInvestors.com.

Among the other topics he touched upon:

– His gameindustrymap.com project, assembled by industry volunteers, shows more than 10,000 game companies in 18,000 locations across the globe.

– There are more than 20,000 Flash game web portals, many of them with thousands of games. One of Perry’s companies, Fan Hub, helps sort through these games by providing a game viewer, where the screen shots from each game are displayed on a web page. The user can hover over each screen shot and see the game in action. It’s an intuitive interface for searching through games to find the right one.

– He has just put the finishing touches on a 1,069-page book on game design. It took him five years to write it, and he’s donating all of the proceeds to making the book freely available to college students studying game design.

– And one of Perry’s strangest projects is Project Top Secret, which is a game being designed collectively by more than 60,000 volunteers over the Internet.

Why has Perry got his fingers in so many pies in the game industry? He believes that the global game industry is still in its beginning stages of growth.

“We have to stop taking baby steps if we want to dominate the whole category of entertainment,” he said.

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