Future festival: Edinburgh Interactive 2010

Every year, in the midst of the fringe festival, big names from the games industry come together at the Filmhouse for Edinburgh Interactive – two days of conferences on the future of interactive entertainment. At the same time, on Festival Square, forthcoming titles are made available for the public to play; on showwere Nintendo 's Christmas big hitters, PlayStation 3 's new 3D-enabled titles and Microsoft Kinect . The overwhelming theme was digital distribution, validated succinctly by Igor Pusenjak of iPhone phenomenon Doodle Jump who charted his game's course from underground sensation to 4 million seller. At the close of the first day, Square Enix 's Ian Livingstone chaired a controversial debate on whether the future for developers lay in communicating directly with customers without publishers intervening at all, while Jerry Johnson, of Xbox LIVE , went on to explore how Microsoft's online service had evolved from simple gaming to a full entertainment hub involving Sky, Facebook and Netflix movies. It's by no means a clear-cut issue, but the debates suggested that huge individual successes are leaving smaller developers genuinely confident that digital distribution will enable them to move ahead without publishers in the future – a potentially huge shift for the gaming industry. Elsewhere, Sony Computer Entertainment 's CEO Ray Maguire, who led a session on gaming in 3D, acknowledged the crucial state of flux the distribution debate had illustrated. Edinburgh had offered, he said, a window on the "transitions that the industry is going through, rather than just today's product… we used to call ourselves the video game industry, but we're a million miles away from that. We're the interactive industry now."