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Sunday, March 22, 2009

Adam at GDC

I'm getting ready to head out to the Game Developers Conference, arguably the biggest industry trade show of the year.

We'll be launching our new product, Gamebryo LightSpeed, and demonstrating it in some pretty unique ways with a demo we built with the software suite.

I'm the product manager for Gamebryo, and the producer for this year's demo, so I'm pretty stoked for our showing this year. I also did the audio design, mixing, and VO, so if you don't like it, blame me.

If you're at the show, swing by Emergent's booth #5818.

I've said before, folks in the industry are talking about the industry's needs for rapid prototyping and rapid iteration -- but come by our booth so we can show you what it looks like in action.

I've also synched my Brightkite posts to my Twitter account, so if you're in SF and want to catch up, DM me if you're close, and I'll get the message on my phone.

Best of luck to all of us next week.

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Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Competitive Positioning

GDC is next week, we're launching a new product at Emergent, and the competitive positioning and borderline mudslinging is getting hot and heavy.

A lot of the rhetoric over the next few weeks is going to sound the same -- the industry knows a lot of the problems that need to be addressed. And there's a truism that says there are no new software implementations under the sun.

And while I do take issue with that assertion, even if it's true, I genuinely believe that the innovation is in the implementation, and there's plenty of innovation still to be had.

I'm incredibly excited about Gamebryo LightSpeed. Sure, I'm an EGT employee, so I hope I would be; but the truth is, I'm the kind of guy who needs to be passionate about what I'm building, and if I wasn't, I'd be looking for more exciting opps.

But like I said, the competitive positioning is ramping up, and while I hope this post is similar to my friendly back and forth with Brett Seyler over at GarageGames, The recent Gamasutra Terminal Reality / Joe Kreiner positioning interview -- I feel -- creates a good opportunity for me to talk about Emergent's particular business model.

The Gamasutra interview provides launching point fodder anyway, but Mr. Kreiner takes pains to call out EGT, calling some our statements "outrageous".

Oh, no he di'n't!

First, let's get a couple of things out of the way.

I don't know Joe, and so don't really have an opinion about him, per se. He's new to Terminal Reality and (as far as I can tell), direct licensing game development middleware, but seems to have a good (and well thought of) career at companies like Logitech and Cyrix. So he and I share some large-company background.

He also seems to be savvy, articulate, and polished (at least in print). All good things I look for with industry folks.

And outside of Joe, one of the things I'd like to get out of the way is our difference in business models. There are multiple game middleware business models, with the two I care about for purposes of this discussion being "middleware developer that also publishes a game", and "middleware developer that does not".

I think both business models have pros and cons. EGT is very committed to not making games, Primarily because our conviction is we don't want to take resources away from developing our tech for our licensees. That means we have to guard against not getting too distanced from game development, but it's not the all-or-nothing scenario Joe says it is -- and it's certainly not that "Emergent's statements frankly show that they really don't understand game development".

He said we were making some outrageous statements. But I'd call this one of his "ludicrous".

Our employees, besides coming from enterprise backgrounds like me (Visa, IBM, Siebel, etc.), come from the industries that provide our customer base (video games, serious games and visual simulations, academic, and so on). On the games side, just a small sampling of the companies from which our folks come include the likes of Codemasters, The Collective, Criterion, Destineer, Electronic Arts, Hasbro, Microprose, Red Storm, Softimage, Sony, Turbine -- not a bad pedigree for a game industry company to have.

Adding to that, we also partner directly with several of our licensees, where they give us immediate feedback into what works and what features they need (and you're going to be seeing more of this kind of thing).

So that's our business model. Other companies (like Epic and Terminal) include in their business model a studio that make games, in addition to having teams -- smaller than what EGT has -- working on the engine tech.

There are some pros to that. I think the model works better for someone like Epic than Terminal, since Epic owns their IP (Gears is pretty slick), and can give those assets as part of an engine license, as opposed to Terminal needing to "have to remove the talent and any copyrighted items" from the Ghostbusters starter they intend to ship to licensees.

Indulging in some competitive positioning of my own, as a potential licensees of the Infernal engine, I personally would be concerned that Joe says, "we're focused on engine development, but we also have a studio side, so we're not necessarily dependent on that licensing income to improve the engine and survive."

To me, that could derail a company from focusing on creating good, solid, repurpose-able middleware. Which one is Terminal's core competency? Or are they just hedging their bets in a down economy?

Speaking of licensees, Terminal has some good (and personally respected) ones in their initial six. I do think it's important to call out Kreiner is candid these "existing licensees were mostly developers that were familiar with Infernal just from either working at Terminal Reality or with us on other projects". And, almost without exception, these are not licensees exclusive to Terminal as far as middleware engine licensing goes.

And Terminal has six licensees. Emergent is in the hundreds.

Now, I fully expect (and am excited to hear) more announcements from Terminal (and Epic, and Garage, and ...) on the middleware front at GDC this week and next.

You'll certainly be hearing more from us.

I think things are going to get very interesting in this space over the next several months. I, for one, am excited about the challenges, and welcome the competitive motivation.

To be clear, this post isn't at all meant to be a pissing contest (the problem with pissing contests is all parties get wet). This is just a response I felt is warranted by Joe's direct reference to EGT, and what I feel is an inaccurate (but purposefully chosen) characterization of our business model and our claims.

Plus it gave me a good springboard from which to post.

More next week.

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Monday, January 12, 2009

Video game middleware pricing, licensing, and positioning

For some time, I've been drafting a post with various directed thoughts around middleware pricing, licensing and product positioning for the vidoe game market -- both in general and relation to Gamebryo from Emergent Game Technologies.

After reading a post Saturday morning from Brett Seyler, Biz Dev manager for GarageGames's Torque SDK, I'm pulling out a subset of that content, and piggy backing off of Brett's post.

First, let me say the GG post has some very good, very candid information. I'm impressed with what GarageGames has done in the market, I personally share several of the same philosophical goals detailed in Brett's post, and he and I share at least some slant common background in that both he and I have had to make "a very weird kind of transition ... from that button up [financial services] world to the laid back, but hyper-competitive world of a startup software company". I probably could not agree more with him that "business is just business, and finding ways to succeed and get more done is universal across those kind of boundaries." (Frankly, the game industry as a whole would do better if they would get over their hubris, acknowledge this, and utilize applicable genuine big gun folks from other industries.)

And I empathize with Brett, because developing pricing and licensing models is wicked hard work -- "throw something at the wall and see what sticks" is a legacy (and potentially company-costing) way to figure out business models.

But ... ;-)

All that said, there's more going on in the GG post than just the listed "Pricing and Licensing" topic. It's a also a product positioning post, and there is intentional or misinformed placement of Gamebryo within the context of the post (which, to be fair, may be due to the candor and scope of the post, so it's almost guaranteed some things will fall out).

First (and easiest) to correct is Brett's mischaracterization of Gamebryo as an "upstart". Gamebryo is, in fact, one of the longest-standing and oft-used game engines in the market, reaching back to it's storied roots with Numerical Design Limited (NDL) and the NetImmerse engine. A lot of the same engine developers have consistently updated, redesigned, and re-architected the engine over the years to meeting the needs of interactive developers, and keep up with that changing landscape of hardware platforms. Gamebryo easily predates Torque (even in it's pre-GarageGames incarnation as the Tribes 2 FPS game engine developed by Dynamix in 2001).

Second, it's easy to see the "competitive positioning 101" marginalizing going on here.

(Hopefully, what follows will be articulate, and still respectful of GarageGames's positioning.)

In positioning your company and / or product, you obviously want to showcase why you're the only right solution for the problem, and why anyone else in the same space is either (a) not really a competitor, and / or (b) is missing the boat for actually solving the problem.

Brett posits the following in his post:
"Gamebryo has some good tech and a good marketing / sales team, but no dedicated studio to consistently test the tech and then demonstrate where they stack up next to Unreal or other AAA competitors, so I think they're doomed to fail in AAA."
Intentional or not, this is a masterful positioning statement. Acknowledging that it does tip its hat to Gamebryo's proven technology, it still attempts to do the following:
  1. Minimize the tech as flash over substance (just "a good marketing / sales team")
  2. Question our credibility (inferring "no dedicated studio" is a negative in Emergent's product / service offering)
  3. Ignore published titles to imply there is no way to measure how we "stack up next to Unreal or other AAA competitors"
  4. Marginalize us as being "only" a triple-A offering
  5. Sow the seed of doubt as to our viability (um, "I think they're doomed to fail")

These are easy enough to answer, and that one sentence gives me not only a springboard to refute the allegations, but a nice framework with which to do so.

Gamebryo: Proven Tech that isn't Flash (Minimize the tech as flash over substance)

Building on the freshly reiterated fact we've been around for a good while, keep in mind Gamebryo's been used in more than 250 titles, with more than a hundred more currently in development. This doesn't include academic, research, some government, and related licensees of ours, which makes this number go waaay up.

All of this is across multiple platforms -- more than any of our major competitors, and also more than Torque (and it may be more than any of our major competitors combined, but I need to fact-check that).

I also find this allegation from GarageGames interesting, since one of the things they try to head off is the perception of Torque (particularly Torque 2D) as being a Flash also-ran. (See, I made a funny with the title of this section, combined with middleware humor. Erm, I also totally dig Flash.)

Emergent's strength is making technology for your game (inferring "no dedicated studio" is a negative in Emergent's product / service offering)

There are pros and cons to developing / publishing games as part of a middleware business model. Same goes for not developing a game.

On one extreme is Epic, who makes their game engine to power Unreal Tournament III and impressive Gears of War 2, and licensing those game feature enhancements as engine enhancements for an ancilliary revenue model.

On the other extreme are hobbyist game engines that do nothing but make the engine (or subsets like math libraries or software rendering), with no vehicles exercising or demonstrating their tech.

Part of Emergent's business model currently is to not make games. We revisit it on a regular basis (like I said, there are pros and cons), but I think it's pretty important that I'm responsible for a product that makes technology so you can make your game. In my smaller moments, I like to say, "Your title won't be unrealized because we're making ours."

This lets us put more people working on the game engine tech and tools (and more people than GarageGames says they're putting on Torque 3D and its "parallel project").

And, we do make sure we dogfood our own technology by creating samples, demos, mini applications, and playable "games" that test, exercise, and showcase the features. We ship these with the product, with full source code and assets for our evaluators and licensees. Some of these we even make publicly available in playable binary form (like last year's GDC zombie shooter). And speaking of GDC, this year's attendees are in for a treat with our show floor demo (full disclosure: I'm the producer).

Like I said, we constantly evaluate our business models, but this is where we are right now. Gamebryo's power is in large part due to its flexibility, and the fact that you can make your game with the tech, rather than just cracking open someone else's game and -- after a boatload o' work -- running the risk of your title looking like you just re-skinned the engine provider's in-house game.

Our licensees showcase their technology -- and ours (Ignore published titles to imply there is no way to measure how we "stack up next to Unreal or other AAA competitors"

This one is odd, because for me the way to at least superficially measure tech is to look at the titles using it -- and like I said above, there are a lot of titles using Gamebryo.

If you look at just a sampling of titles built with Gamebryo, and current triple-A titles in the market, you'll see us included in big guns like PC MMO Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, multiplatform strategy title Sid Meier's Civilization: Revolution, and the upcoming console reincarnation of Splatterhouse. And it's not Crytek's or Epic's logo you'll find on the back of titles like the - current - way - I - spend - my - days - and - nights, Fallout 3.

Sooo ... I think I know how we stack up.

Emergent is AAA -- and then some (Marginalize us as being "only" a triple-A offering)

Gamebryo is proven in the triple-A market, but to marginalize it as being "just" triple-A is a clever way to try to convince licensees (and investors) that GG is going after a different market -- one served just by them.

One of my personal philosophies driving my participation in the game industry is to make the best tech available to people so they can make the best games. That's largely independent of budget or genre. This is a big chunk of why I made the jump from my previous more lucrative financial services gig (that and me just being personally passionate about games; and alliteration).

Sure, Gamebryo is in the headline-grabbing games above. But we're also a great fit for projects of various team sizes, budgets, and project durations -- well below the tens - of - millions - of - dollar, multi-year development cycle titles. And we provide the same great tech and tools to those teams.

As I've written before,

"... Gamebryo actually does hit the sweet spot for developing 3D interactive experiences -- of any size or type -- which for me means making sure we make the best tools and tech available to people making all sorts of games with all sorts of time and budget restrictions. Casual games? Check. Serious Games? Check. Triple A? Check. Commercial titles? Check. MMOs? Check. More? Check."

Not to belabor the point (and acknowledging I don't believe we can be all things to all people), we're also very well-suited for that class of game (with which I join Brett in championing) that is the less than big-box priced, but still innovative, unexpected, and just plain fun title.

As an example, yes, we're in the excellent Sid Meier's Civilization: Revolution. We're also underneath Hidden Path Entertainment's Defense Grid: The Awakening, available from Steam for ~$20.


It's important to say I would in no way characterize Defense Grid as a "budget" title. I would characterize it as that new breed of title that is high production value, great bang-for-the-buck, and innovating under new challenging models of budget and timeline constraints. You should play this game.

Last year, Gamebryo launched our "Casual" program, and while this particular section of the game development market needs a new moniker to showcase the diversity in titles, budgets, timelines, and innovation we're seeing in the space, what hasn't been ambiguous is our success with the initiative. Full Gamebryo, but tailored for your project constraints? Huzzah!

Going back to Brett's contention of shrinking high-end game budgets, I do question his reduction of the AAA addressable market (I'm not sure what he's using to quantify it); though he may just be doing this as an artifact of arguing that's not an addressable market of interest to GG.

While I agree Epic is the well-hyped name in the high-end space (and Brett has some good barbs on that front), budgets for high-end games (and therefore addressable market dollars) have significantly expanded this console generation. While big-budget titles may have had budgets of $10-15M in the Xbox, PS2, and GameCube days, today's titles of the equivalent caliber can run budgets of $25M or more. Since the number of title starts hasn't lessened, linear math says this is ostensibly doubling the addressable market dollars a middleware company could conceivably go after -- but that's independent of the additional growth the industry is/was seeing, at least prior to the economic downturn. If you look at the dollar value of the AAA market as compared to the non-AAA, you could argue triple-A title starts could be anywhere between an eighth to a twenty-fifth of the rest of the market before those addressable dollars started getting smaller than the addressable dollars of those other projects.

Besides, I'm a big fan of scrappy, aspirational companies upsetting the status quo -- regardless of vertical market.

(As an aside, independent of its representational accuracy, for whatever reason I'm tickled by this graphic of Brett's, and Mark Rein's encrumbed face. Dunno what that says. Maybe it's because pecan pie is my favorite?)

Brett Seyler AAA middleware pie diagram

(As an aside aside, I think I've used more parentheticals in this post then I have ever used in a post; if not in a given month.)

We're diversified, and we're here for our licensees (Sow the seed of doubt as to our viability)

Just like middleware is not "our game in a box" (above), it's thankfully also not "your game in a box" (if it was, everybody could make your game, out-of-the-box).

I feel that Gamebryo is a great fit for triple-A projects; but we're not "just" for triple-A titles.

I also believe Gamebryo works well for casual projects; but we're not "just" casual projects (or whatever we name this broad swatch of opportunity that exists between hobbyist and Big Studio).

And while Brett doesn't really talk academics as licensees (which is odd, since I thought roughly half of GG's revenue comes from that constituency), but we've got those folks (including students) covered, too.

I get that Gamebryo isn't for everyone. Being a bit snarky, maybe those folks not needing to save money and time by licensing proven tech that also includes a boatload of additional middleware integrations shouldn't license us.

Being less snarky (and totally honest), I do know Gamebryo isn't for everyone. There are some titles that plan on being so specialized, they don't know if customizing licensed tech will save over building their own from the ground up. There are other projects that might require our tech to be so generalized it would be no good many of our licensees (platform-specific or otherwise).

There are others that don't have the budget or need or for a commercial game engine offering. for some, Flash is a better option (depending on their needs).

And so on.

The good news is we have past licensees who had a later project that wasn't a match for our tech, and come back to us when they have one that does. We have had prospects for whom we genuinely weren't a match, and because we had the conversations and they knew what we were about, they followed up with us when they had projects that were a match -- and they've been tremendously successful.

Multiplatform support, flexibility and extensibility for developers, enabling the power of multiple hardware threads -- these are core product differentiators for us, and they benefit our licensees.

Steady, hardened releases, ongoing new features and functionality, new licensing programs to address customer needs, responsiveness to market and developer requests, tighter platform partnerships benefiting teams at the technology level -- these are all hallmarks of Gamebryo releases.

Those things -- which enable time and cost savings for licensees for all types and constraints -- are what make us successful in the middleware space.

Make no mistake, it's challenging out there right now. There are a bunch of new middleware competitors cropping up. Studios are changing their business models as they react to immediate events, acquisition changes, the "professionalizing" of the industry, a wicked tough global economy, and knee-jerk Wall Street reactions. These all make for the challenging problems we're trying to solve in product positioning, licensing, and pricing models.

Again, I really respect what Brett laid out in his post, and I'm grateful for the springboard it gave me (if you've read this far, maybe you're not ;-).

Comments? Hit me up through my Web page (please include a working Email). Or you can always reach me through LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc.

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Saturday, July 19, 2008

Gamebryo / EGT updates

So what's up with Emergent Game Technologies and / or the Gamebryo game engine recently?

On the Gamebryo-powered games front (at least retail), there's Space Chimps from developer REDTRIBE and publisher Brash Entertainment, on the Wii, 360, PS2, and DS.

On the MMO front, the open beta for Magic World Online (dev Goldcool Games and publisher Ingle Games Ltd.) starts June 20.

The big PC MMO for this year, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, started its closed guild beta July 11. This is from long-time developer licensee EA Mythic, and is being published by Electronic Arts.

On the partner integration front, Allegorithmic's ProFX for Gamebryo 2.3 and 2.5 is available, as is our updated Gamebryo 2.5 integration with Audiokinetic's WWise.

Finally, there are also new case studies on the Emergent Web site, including Image Metrics (from the facial animation demo we showed at GDC this year), and Coldwood (another GDC demo with a long-time licensee, showing what seven or eight people can do to create a hot tech demo in about a month's time) -- video accessible via the pict below.

Coldwood Case Study screenshot

Right, that's good for the work side of my gaming life for now.

(EDIT: Cleaned up links -- thank, Vince, for the heads up.)

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Wednesday, July 09, 2008

Gamebryo / EGT updates

As Product Manager for 3D engine Gamebryo, it probably makes sense for me to -- at least every once in a while -- summarize what's happening on that video game front.

Aside from our recent release (was it just over a month ago?!), we're not standing still.

Here's what's happened in just the last few days (I'm too lazy to go back through the whole month right now).

On the games front, there are a few titles with recent movement from that long list o' titles I posted for this year alone.

Notably, this week (today) sees Gamebryo-powered title Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution hit store shelves.

There's also a little Gamebryo-powered offering from Google (Lively). It's for Google to talk about, but there are number of online interviews where Google mentions the Gamebryo engine.

Emergent is also good about technology partnerships -- we understand we can't build everything, and we're sensitive to our licensees' investments in other middleware. More than just "paper partnerships", our partnerships are generally tech integrations available out-of-the-box (or via easy download) that let you leverage other top-tier games middleware in a powerful way.

Updated integrations include Audiokinetic's awesome Wwise audio pipeline offering, compatible with Gamebryo 2.5.

Then there's Aristen, a new company with a special effects sequencing tool. There launch press release was earlier than I expected, but it has a nice plug for Emergent.

Finally (at least on this) we released our first Allegorithmic ProFX integration with Gamebryo. Massive procedural textures, itty bitty compressionables. Yum.

Good stuff -- more to come shortly.

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