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Big Business Loves the Computer Gaming Industry
David Greenspan writes "Video games are no longer exclusive to a consumer market. Business Week has an article on the new trend of big business willing to pay millions for custom-made games. The casual market has inspired folks in business to realize the broad appeal of games, and some of the possibilities inherent to the medium. As a result, business games are now big business. From the article: 'To reach the billion-dollar mark, the market will have to overcome the common wisdom that games are inherently not serious. A serious games market will also require game developers to shift from the traditional business-to-consumer model to a business-to-business one. Today when major studios and publishers are approached by companies interested in commissioning, say, an employee-training game based on a successful commercial title, more often than not those studios and publishers decline. Even if the interested company is offering $5 million, it's not worth the gamemakers' time to divert engineers from a commercial title likely to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.'"
My son was too young for Doom, but in his box of cereal one day was a Doom clone called ChexQuest, which we both loved. Strictly a corporate game, but a lot of fun, with phlegm instead of death and gore.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Where Nissan paid to get some cars added and doing the tournament thing.
http://forzamotorsport.net/nissan.htm
The logic makes sense to me. Now, back to flipping through Muscle & Fitness Magazine! God, those guys are BUILT!
I can't wait for the business training game, Salesman: Blood Money, where you play as Mr. 47, a genetically engineered salesman, created from the DNA of the five more dangerous salesmen.
Maybe now they will start using the 1984 classic arcade game Paperboy to the next generation of paperboy.
Half the lies they say about me aren't true
Cute Rush
One only has to look at the success of the Burger King XBox games to know this has the potential to be absolutely huge.
All it would really take is for a corp to do a couple of things, and have it done (relatively) on the cheap:
- License an existing game engine for a fixed sum
- hit a place like Gamasutra (or any popular MOD board) and hire some freelancers
It's not exactly as if you have to howl in the wilderness. It just takes some brains is all.For 5 million bucks, I'm sure a corp could secure and contract the requisite resources w/o having to resort to desperate measures.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I don't follow - Game shop should focus on B2B offerings, in order to make more money (the $1B mark), but it's more profitable to sell to consumers? Why should game shops go against their self interest?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Even if the interested company is offering $5 million, it's not worth the gamemakers' time to divert engineers from a commercial title likely to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in sales
For $5e6, you could hire an extra prorgammer to do the customization and still turn a profit. Also, it's probably an unwise idea to give up a certain $5e6 to avoid a possible impact on maybe a much larger sum.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
No one will remember Red vs. Blue; Only Coke vs. Pepsi.
with phlegm instead of death and gore
A questionable improvement, to be sure.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Why not produce those games? For example, a lawyer training game based upon something like Resident Evil or BloodRayne - they're already disease-infested vampires, it should require virtually -no- changes!
So if I went to Spielberg and asked him to spend a couple years on a "Employee Training for Microsoft" movie for $5m, do you think he'd go for it?
FTFS, which is FTFA: 'To reach the billion-dollar mark, the market will have to overcome the common wisdom that games are inherently not serious. A serious games market will also require game developers to shift from the traditional business-to-consumer model to a business-to-business one."
The first sentence I agree with. "The Market" will need to get over itself and the idea that products which are put to trivial uses must be trivial. The second sentence, however, does not follow logically from the first or from observable reality. We have a serious games market. It's a hybrid of B2B and B2C, with a lot of the end products (and the raison d'etre of the B2B types) coming from their B2C counterparts. Look at all the engine makers. If the original game engines (meant to be bought and played by end-users) had not succeeded, if the demand by gamers for games based on said engines did not exist, there would be no market for things like the Unreal and Quake engines. B2B game marketing is merely a new segment, not the whole of the market.
"computer-aided training simulators"
It has to be catchy, but serious. Strategy Sharpeners? I dunno.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Isn't this repeting what happened in 1983 Video Games on a budget is not nessarly a good thing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I can already see the Doom clone for customer service reps.
1) Customer lures you in with the promise of an easy frag. - "I can't get my email."
2) Customer side steps your opening salvo - "Yes, my computer is plugged in."
3) You run out of ammo while the customer bunny hops towards you. - "I have just tried telnetting to port 110 on pop.yourcompany.com and recieved a timeout. I then tried a traceroute and can't reach your facility."
4) Customer drops a grenade on your head - "No, I think it could be the power outage in your data center that is being reported on CNN right now."
5) You respawn in the middle of 10 customers holding grenades. - "Somebody turn on the ambush for God's sake!"
A couple of 30-somethings embark on the ultimate roadtrip
You have Unix at home now, but no stress or incentive to scramble in learning it. My biggest hurdle and that of most anyone just starting out, is translating academic and hobby experience into the real world.
It would be neat if someone would write a Linux application that simulated all kinds of disasters/problems in a real captivating environment, spiced it up a little with some kind of interesting plot-line, and left the user to his own devices to try and solve these problems. You'd give him the tools already present on his home computer, namely, everything that is Linux. Even it it was only slightly compelling, it would still be a step up from reading man pages out of simple curiosity. It would also give you problems to solve that would not otherwise present themselves in the scope of a home environment.
Turn this all into a game, and score the "player" on his resourcefulness and the correctness of his solutions.
My sister's nephew (her brother-in-law's son) is a rookie driver in NASCAR. Every track has a computerized simulation and he drives the sim every week for practice, even if he's not scheduled to drive in the race. All the drivers do these sims. I have no idea how much these sims cost to produce, or how often they're revised.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_game
Animoog.org
We need a new name that describes mature video games in more mature terms. the same way that graphic novels separated itself from comic books.
One of the most fun games i've ever played was Big Bumpin
n /
as a burgerking game where your in bumper cars and you have different styles of games youc an play. Best 5 bucks I ever spent. Me and my friends had a blast. Seriously it was fun.
http://games.teamxbox.com/xbox-360/1576/Big-Bumpi
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
If the market is 5 million vs a potential 15 million its easier to follow the money and its a no brainer.
Most training business apps can be written in flash by a jr programmer or javaFX. Game engine licensing is a different issue. You can license it for a few hundred thousand and just hire some temp game programmers if you have a 5 million dollar budget but dont expect the game makers to develop anything but a license for you.
http://saveie6.com/
Video game companies are very good at making effective and user-friendly software, and that kind of quality is lacking in products made for buisnesses - most of which have to settle for generic CAD programs that can do "everything" instead of merely doing the specific application required easily and effectively.
Take SimCity for example - if you could adapt it to instead be used for city-planning in works departments (water, gas, civil/construction, hydro, etc.), it would make things more simple/easy, and it could simulate the future.
It has been proved that you learn faster and better when you have fun.
Some business already spend millions of dollars in training.
The whole problem is in the 'business should be mind-fucking serious' mindset.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
It's called advergaming. A subset of Serious Games Game engines used in architecture
Okay, I'll bite. What about a text-based interactive fiction game? I spent hours and hours while in college trying to solve adventure. (Aside: Solved it with 350 out of 350 points on May 9, 1977.) Why did I do THAT when I had so many other demands on my time?
So, an IF game with some "rooms" which had "puzzles" to solve would be simple enough to create. To make it playable and enjoyable, well, that's another matter, but even then it's quite doable. (<grin>Some of us nerds DO know how to write!</grin>)
Example: Customer Service Representative (CSR) for an in-house application. Take some cases from the Tier-1 call center "solution scripts". Wrap it up in a day's adventure with incoming calls and a count-up timer for how long it took you to solve particular puzzle(s). Have some notes on a hall-way white board. A "manual" that you find on a table in the corporate library. Get x-amount of points for solving each puzzle. As the game progresses, a user could be given access with a special pass to higher floors in the building where increasingly difficult challenges await. (Take these from Tier-2 call center solutions.) Create some "colorful" customers to highlight different response techniques. (Screaming Sammy, Timid Tom, Newbie Ned, Impulsive Ivan, etc.) You get the idea.
To sum this up, there's an old saw that I believe is apropos here:
Tell me, and I will forget.
Show me, and I may remember.
Involve me, and I will understand.
$5 million? Sure! I'd like a piece of that! Heck, for JUST $100K, I could *easily* create a "game" in a month or two. AND, it would be easy to extend to other levels and challenges. AND, because it was text-based, it could easily run as an application on a phone or PDA.
Any takers?
Or simply Capitalism.
BTW in reply to one of your other posts. There are companies that create mods for game engines that cater to the business market.
I play this game everyday. I have to say, while there are moments of interesting problems and solutions to them... most of the time is spent grinding.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The updated version will feature a 30+ year old "Paperboy" in a beat up 4 cylinder throwing papers at 2am while cruising down the road at 40mph+...
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Sorry, there might be some company refusing to make a title when offered $5 millions, but that's rather the exception than the norm. It won't be hard to find a game company which will do it for that much money.
Most game companies have a very hard time to even make a living and close to none do make those hundreds of millions of which this article does speak.
I would even bet that _every_ big publisher does know a team which would do it for such an amount. And I'm not even talking about startup teams here. Maybe it's not the same here in Germany, but usually even getting $1 million sales is already consider a hit here.
How to find the meeting room:
>you are in a twisty maze of cubicles, all alikeHow to navigate the HR benefits phone tree:
>you are in a twisty maze of indecipherable options, all alikeHow to navigate the office supply procurement web site:
>you are in a twisty maze of unusable web pages, all alikeare these companies going to publishers? or direct to developer houses? If its direct to a developer then $5mil is a good chunk. Most of the time developers just get a budget from the publisher while the publisher is making tons off sales. So going to a publisher is like going to the middle man and B2B should interact with the content developers.
Balderdash!
Sounds like a great opportunity for game modders to go into business for themselves and make a nice pile of cash.
for only $5k!
er, if i can still find my copy of Klik-N-Play...
A good example of this is the two big players in the remote control plane market, who both have their own PC based R/C flight sims: FS One and RealFlight; both of which were outsourced to actual developers.
My
"For example, a lawyer training game based upon something like Resident Evil or BloodRayne - they're already disease-infested vampires, it should require virtually -no- changes!"
OUCH!
One of the main reasons that games are so much better than other commercial software is that the developers actually use them, and are often in the target market. When was the last time that a developer of a city-planning app was also a city planner in his spare time? Stayed up late some nights city planning? You don't really know the pain points until you experience them first hand.
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"To reach the billion-dollar mark, the market will have to overcome the common wisdom that games are inherently not serious."
I disagree, to reach the billion-dollar mark, the market will have to ACCEPT the common wisdom that games are inherently not serious. Currently, not being "serious" is a turn off. Games will never be inherently "serious". But businesses as of late, have been quickly realizing that "serious" does not always translate to productivity. More likely, what we're going to see is the market accepting the non-serious side of games... not games becoming serious as a result.
The fact is, the game industry is booming right now. Game developers have no reason to change their business strategies, drastically, to accommodate for markets which may disagree with their fundimental principals.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Anyone else remember the Doom based sysadmin front end? :)
The attitude of business towards gamers is easily seen in the huge number of flash-based games pages. Even people who should know better seem to think that gamers want animation, music, and transition effects in their web pages. Even if it all comes at the expense of fast loading. It's like putting non-skippable cutscenes in the game itself or lots of transition effects in a dvd menu. Those same people designing a page for a business oriented product would never think to include that kind of effects unless they increased usability somehow.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."