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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
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.
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?
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.
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.
Synergy Enhancers!
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.
This Software Was Made For Business
Rated M for Mature:
For Real-world situations, Work-like Environment, Frequent Interruptions, and Panic-inducing Deadlines.
Rated AO for Adults Only:
Portrays Double-Entry Accounting and Enforces GAAP
Rainbow Six Sigma
'nuff said
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
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?
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.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
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 alikeThere was also a similar promotion with Cadillac and PGR3.
Fine by me... it just means I get more free cars to play with, if anything this is good. Rather than Developer X paying heaps of money for licensing they auto makers pay the game developer to include their cars... As long as they steer clear of the "make sure our car outperforms our competitors car in the game" then it can greatly reduce development costs.
Collector's Edition