Much to my regret, I had to miss GDC San Francisco this year, but I've been following with interest some of the session transcripts and got feedback from my colleagues who just returned. One thing I noted in particular was Raph Koster's comments on the iteration speed of web developers (measured in days  or weeks typically) vs that of game studios (where the difference might be six months for a casual Wii title and four years for a triple-A PS3 title -- of course iterating inside the development team, but with little consumer feedback). It seems Raph has taken a lot of this onboard in the development of Metaplace, as seen in their pre-release "postmortem" session.

Of course, I noted this because this pretty much reflects how we (Sulake) have been modeling not just our development process but our business management methods driving that development. That is, make the iteration cycle ever faster, learn to do big changes in very, very small chunks, incorporating metrics- and testing-based learning all through the cycle.

Also, I'm going to be talking about this very topic this May in ION 08 in Seattle. Looks like I missed a lot of interesting discussion relevant to that session, so I hope I won't be repeating too much of what was already stated in GDC.