Christian Nutt from Gamasutra has done a great job of encapsulating the 2009 news from the game engine market.
There are new players this year, internal engines are being shared across teams more, and as he points out the extended cycle of the consoles and the proven long tail of these consoles ensures there will continue to be lots of 360 and PS3 business out there for the growing pack of middleware vendors.
I think a significant new trend in 2009 is the birth of the prosumer game developer. Prosumers have permanently changed the photography industry; competing with professionals for revenue and manufacturers R&D and Marketing attention.
Both Unity and Epic have made significant moves in the prosumer space in 2009. Read the rest of this entry »
3M call it the 15 percent rule, Google call it 20% time and now Unity has adopted what they call FAFF (Fridays Are For Fun).
“I think there are a lot of low hanging fruits in Unity where somebody with drive can just do something cool that pushes us forward. Things that are hard to put in words, but just make sense when you see it done.
So every Friday, developers can work on something cool, something they have been craving to do for a long time.”
Joachim Ante, Unity CTO, via Unity Blog.
This idea of giving employees company time to pursue their ideas is powerful. It acknowledges that everyone in the company has great ideas worthy of investment. Read the rest of this entry »
Last night I was directed to Joel Spolsky’s blog and his post Camels and Rubber Duckies; it’s a very long post but recommended if you have the time. (thanks @SoftwareMaven)
In his post Joel tries to help you find the best price for your software but towards the end he highlights what he calls bad idea #2;
Bad Idea #2: How Much Money Do You Have? Pricing.
This is the kind used by software startups founded by ex-Oracle salesmen where the price isn’t on the website anywhere. No matter how much you search to find the price, all you get is a form to provide your name, address, phone number, and fax number, for some reason, not that they’re ever going to fax you anything. It’s pretty obvious here that the plan is to have a salesman call you up and figure out how much you’re worth, and then charge you that much. Read the rest of this entry »
Passion and a sense of humor are key aspects of good brand. People remember you if you can make them smile, they will only be passionate about your product if you are. But so many companies hide how excited they are about their own products because they are trying to brand themselves “Serious, mission critical, trust.. Bla, Bla Bla”.
At NxN we sold trust. The products adoption relied 100% on the artist’s ability to trust the system with their assets. If we got the sale but not the trust our life expectancy in a game studio was measured in months.
NxN’s Alienbrain product was originally called MediaStation, Alienbrain was the internal code name for an R&D project that never saw the light of day (unfortunately).
At a corporate retreat in a deserted summer castle in the German Alps (think “The Shining” hotel and you are there) the 15 outward facing people in the company (sales, marketing, field engineers & product managers) got together to talk about many things, one of them re-branding the product. Read the rest of this entry »
It was a misty morning in 1999 and I was touring the local car dealerships near London. I was looking for a new car, not sure what but something that was going to be more comfortable and exciting than my Ford Mondeo (Taurus in the US) for long consulting trips up north.
I went to BMW, Mercedes, Renault and even back to Ford, the new Mondeo was getting good reviews.
The sales people would come over, tell me a bit about the car I was looking at, normally the same info I could find on the first page of the brochure (that they had run out of). Bad-mouth the competitor (they worked there last year and know from the inside that that company sucks) and ask if I wanted to “run the numbers” or take it for a test.
I moved on, uninspired and I was already talking myself out of upgrading this year.. I should save the money. Read the rest of this entry »
