The Montreal International Games Summit was held November 27-28, 2007 and gathered many developers from around the world - in fact it holds the title of the second-biggest game development conference next to GDC. It certainly didn't seem that way to me at first, but when you enter a keynote hall that looks able to hold around 800 people it's a lot easier to believe. Like all conferences though it doesn't ever feel overwhelming in size and in such a small area it's easy to meet up with old friends and meet new people. Being the sole GDNet writer in attendance I wasn't able to cover a whole lot, and the fact that my flight got cancelled the night before the start of the conference and I ended up flying in early the next day and missing the first half of the first day didn't help matters any. Still, I managed to gather some interesting information on casual gaming, a gold mine of Xbox Live Arcade publishing information (seriously, this was the best XBLA talk I've attended to date!) and a preview of Chris Hecker's upcoming GDC 08 talk.

Yes, the fact that this is all appearing over a month late is no one's fault but my own, though if you happened to catch my journal last month I was posting the coverage as I went. I was hoping to snare some additional coverage, things didn't pan out and I let this drag on far longer than it should have. So if it's you're first time checking this coverage out I apologize for the tardiness.

Now then, on to the good stuff!

Page 1 - James Gwertzman (PopCap Games) - Not so casual anymore
Page 2 - Jim Sink (Microsoft) - Getting your game on Xbox Live Arcade
Page 3 - Danny Ledonne - Playing Columbine: A Retrospective Discusson
Page 4 - EIDOS Montreal Studio Tour
Page 5 - Chris Hecker keynote - Structure vs. Style
Page 6 - Parties & Events - Booth Crawl / IGDA Party / Gamma 256

If you want some more MIGS coverage, Gamasutra did some detailed keynote summaries:

Yoshiaki Koizumi
Jonathan Blow
Dave Perry

Finally, Randy Smith put his presentation slides online for his talk "How To Help Your Players Stop Saving All The Time". Since this talk depended a lot on the slide material thanks to diagrams, I won't bother even doing a summary of it as you're better off downloading and reading through the slides, which Randy re-did with copious notes included.

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