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.'"

Comments

Re:Cereal Phlegm Monsters

[G Fab]

http://www.doomlegends.com/chexquest/frames.html It's actually just a doom wad. Pretty funny.

Best corp. game

[Drakin020]

One of the most fun games i've ever played was Big Bumpin

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-Bumpin /

Re:The Real SimCity

[Anonymous Coward]

They usually rewrite OS controls for no reason whatsoever (even Flight Sim!), except to remove functionality. (Your mousewheel doesn't work in Battlefield because it's not a normal scrollbar, it's some mutant scrollbar they coded from scratch, for instance.)

There is a reason, and most of the blame rests on Microsoft. DirectX doesn't provide access to most of the common Windows controls (or, at least, didn't -- I haven't used it in awhile). So if you wanted something in your menu like a nice dropdown list box, you had to code your own library for it or license one. The original Unreal Tournament's menus are a good example of the work required to create your own interface under older versions of DirectX. In fairness, that applies somewhat to OpenGL as well, but DirectX comprises a larger portion of the PC gaming market.

Re:Too real, but i agree.

[conspirator57]

I'm sure there are a few, but i think the point of TFA is that the majors "ought" to be in that market. The point underlying theirs seems to be one primarily concerned with brand acceptance in the business community and the increased adoption of games for training, etc. that they feel would result from companies being solicited by EA Corporate Training vs. Bob's Corporate Game Shack.