Last time I went to DICE--the "Design Innovate Communicate Entertain" Summit that happens annually just outside of the Las Vegas action zone--my luggage got stolen, robbing me of my clothes, my cell phone, my house and car keys, and my PSP. That's what I get, I suppose, for packing all of that crap in my luggage and not keeping it on me. I ended up going on a brief shopping spree at the Adidas store and walked around town for the rest of the trip looking like an out-of-shape basketball player living tracksuit fabulous.
Between that and the embarrassing, Jay Mohr-hosted awards show, DICE houses some painful memories, so I haven't been back since. But there are definitely some interesting talks that happen at the show, and this year's show, which is currently underway, is no exception.
MTV Multiplayer's Stephen Totilo has been doing a bang-up job of covering some interesting stuff from the summit, and he's got a couple of pieces you can read if you're looking for some deeper, more throughtful things from the minds of the men and women behind your favorite games.
To promote his vision of price flexibility, he presented slides that showed that Valve hadn’t scared customers away — as he worried they might — by recently and repeatedly moving the price up and down for games. He said that a recent promotion for “Left 4 Dead,” for example, enabled Valve to make more revenue selling that game last weekend than the company did when the game launched last fall.
Today, Capcom's Jun Takeuchi took to the stage. He's the producer of Resident Evil 5, in case you forgot, and he presented "The 10 Commandments of Capcom Development." It's an interesting list that provides some insight into how the company is adapting to better serve a worldwide audience.
There won't be too much in the way of actual game-focused news coming out of Vegas, but there's always one or two things confirmed or casually mentioned over the course of the event. We'll pass that along as it happens. Speaking of which, EA apparently just mentioned that they'll be doing a new game in the American McGee's Alice series. So... that happened.