Every year the leaders of the video game industry make a pilgrimage to Las Vegas… well Read Rock Casino and Spa, about 10 miles outside of Vegas to be precise.
Being off the strip is a big advantage as it helps keep the attendees together making DICE the most powerful C-Level networking events on the game calendar.
Last year the chatter was about how hard it was to be an independent studio, this year it was about how great it is to be an independent studio. What a difference a year makes!
Many of the game technology people were there; Read the rest of this entry »
If you look at the leading technology companies in almost any industry you will notice that they are (or were) end users of their technology. They don’t require empathy to understand the customer, they are the customer.
Its a powerful competitive advantage.
The NxN team was not a game development team. It was primarily a group of database and application programmers. We prided ourselves on being specialists and being very customer driven. We spent almost all our time adding the features customers asked for.
Task and project management was a good example; many customers asked for it so we added some rudimentary functionality and asked for feedback. The problem was that the implementation was shallow, enough functionality to say we had task management but not robust enough to be “used in anger”. Read the rest of this entry »
But apart from the pathfinding, the video codecs, trees, occlusion, asset management, DCC tools, physics, the run-time animation systems, and UI’s, what have the middleware vendors ever done for us?
A friend once said that all technology breakthroughs are hacked together out of necessity when production people are trying to do the impossible. Then software companies productize the idea so everyone can benefit.
I read this article on The 10 Best Game Engines recently; from the ten engines only two are available as licensable game technology. And all of them were created in production, for a game.
Is it true?
Are all the “game changing” technology advances created in the heat of production?
A few weeks ago in my post Disrupt the engine market | Autodesk’s bananas I mentioned that Autodesk was getting into the IaaS (infrastructure as a service) business to reduce the IT barrier to entry of large scale film production.
Last week Side Effects Software, makers of Houdini, opened up their cloud rendering solution to Beta testers. It uses the Amazon EC2 platform so Side Effects has harnessed cloud computing for its platform without even taking on the hardware back end risk. Smart. Read the rest of this entry »
In 1997 I joined a technology startup that did everything right.. except the first thing.
Our technology allowed morphing of complex polygonal models, it allowed designers to transfer surface shape from one design to another. Very cool technology; Alias, Autodesk and Softimage were all interested.
But the founder had made a strategic error right at the start; She decided we were in the automotive design technology business. Autodesk could see how useful our technology would be in games, that’s why they were interested and over time most of us realized we were targeting the wrong industry but the CEO’s vision for her company was in the car industry.
Over on Copyblogger Briam Clark has a great article on the subject of jumping into the wrong lake, complete with Purple Rain reference. Read the rest of this entry »
First post in a series where I explore the “what if” scenarios for disruption of the game engine middleware space.
Autodesk is the 800 lb gorilla in the DCC (digital content creation) space, they own just about everything but their dominance as primary tool provider in the games space is being eroded by animation tools, level editors, procedural modeling, procedural terrain and the list goes on.
Is it wise to take the 800 lb gorillas bananas? Read the rest of this entry »
