Slashdot Log In
Big Business Loves the Computer Gaming Industry
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Aug 14, 2007 11:41 AM
from the gnomes-are-always-surprising dept.
from the gnomes-are-always-surprising dept.
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.'"
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Cereal Phlegm Monsters (Score:5, Interesting)
Phlegm? (Score:2, Insightful)
A questionable improvement, to be sure.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Cereal Phlegm Monsters (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Salesman: Blood Money (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like fun.
Have it Your Way (Score:5, Insightful)
Cripes, it can't be that hard... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Serious business? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Training and fun (Score:2)
Some business already spend millions of dollars in training.
The whole problem is in the 'business should be mind-fucking serious' mindset.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Croteam was ahead of their time in more ways than one; they'd seen the need for seriousness in the games industry, and they provided it in spades.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Too dry, but i agree. (Score:4, Funny)
'nuff said
Cheers!
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Games not serious? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting business logic (Score:2)
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.
In 20 years... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Gee, I wonder then why we still remember the Colossal Cave Adventure! [slashdot.org]
Well why not??? (Score:4, Funny)
Answered your own question there, didn't ya? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This would be more like going to Spielberg and asking him to spend a couple of months remixing a previously-filmed movie and adding a couple of extra scenes for $5m.
Re: (Score:2)
A day, and handing the rest of a few months work off to someone a couple of years out of film school?
Quite possibly.
John Cleese of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers (and the cocreator of Yes, Minister) who admittedly are not Spielberg set up a little company in the 1970's making training films.
They sold it (many years ago) for $70m. Not a bad chunk of change; even Spielberg might go for that.
This is low-hanging fruit; the potential to add some relatively high-margin guaranteed
Re: (Score:2)
no, but you might be able to get his non-union Mexican equivalent, Señor Spielbergo.
Re: (Score:2)
With regards to the part of the article that talks about corporate customization of games for corporate or military training, I'm surprised that I didn't see anyone else here talk about this but how about turning to the OSS world for custom game mods? cube [fov120.com] shows great potential for modification. Nexuiz [alientrap.org] looks really nice and plays sweet. Tremulous [tremulous.net] is a great example of a FPS with non-traditional FPS rules.
I would be terribly, terribly remiss not to mention http://live.linux-gamers.net/ [linux-gamers.net] which I have blogg [blogspot.com]
Ah the hubris of business (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
History... (Score:2)
Make training fun! (Score:5, Funny)
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!"
Learning tool indead (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
"Games" like that would work quite well, at least for a limited subset of the work market.
System Administrator Game (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sims for NASCAR drivers (Score:3, Interesting)
Edutainment can work (Score:2)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_game [wikipedia.org]
Name change (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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
Well I agree that developers should focus on games (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The Real SimCity (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Looks like we found someone who's never attempted to play Battlefield: 2142!
For the record, video game companies suck at making user-friendly software. 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 are exceptions
Re: (Score:2)
You mean, like, the entire friggin' field of GIS?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
The main problem with SimCity is that' it's fundamentally grid-based, and cities by and large aren't (though some in North America come close). Adapting the code so that it can support real city layouts is non-trivial, since it forces you to stop using simplifying assumptions (e.g. can't use manhattan distance metrics).
Interactive [non] Fiction to the Rescue! (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, I'll bite. What about a text-based interactive fiction game? I spent hours and hours while in college trying to solve adventure [slashdot.org]. (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?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.