Evolving as an Industry and Community
The current economic climate around the world is impacting everyone, and specifically in the game development community, many of our colleagues are experiencing new challenges. These challenges are accelerating trends that we have all seen for some time and require some deep thinking about how we evolve as an industry and as a community. We at Emergent™ believe that our industry will work through this period and come out the other side more powerful, creative and central to the lives of mainstream culture.
When Emergent Game Technologies began to pursue the path of creating world class technology designed to make it easier and more efficient to build games, we knew that we had to take an approach that was perhaps unconventional for this industry. We had certain core values and concepts that finally take form with the release of Gamebryo LightSpeed™ at this year's GDC conference. Chief amongst those goals is that teams could not only build AAA games on our technology but could also feel confident that they could safely build their studios around our solutions.
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Aligned With the Industry
Mark DeLoura, industry consultant, recently released the results of what seems to be an exhaustive survey of game developers' thoughts and needs regarding middleware and tools. We were delighted to read the results, as the alignment between what the industry is asking for and the product we are delivering is astounding.
LightSpeed's™ key features include:
- Rapid Prototyping out of the box
- Rapid Iteration during development
- Scripting (and by inference script debugging).
These are precisely the key features that developers are requesting, according to Mark's respondents. These features, as implemented, provide developers the ability to reduce development time and dedicate more time and energy toward innovative game play. The features list only scratches the surface. The second blog on the survey speaks more deeply about the technology itself.
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Addressing Concerns of Artists and Developers
Our products have historically been aimed at the engineers: nice, clean, well-structured, well-documented code. Building upon those values, we are now focusing our substantial engineering efforts at designers and artists. If we turn our attention to the biggest concerns developers have, as identified by Mark, they include:
- Game engines are generally not genre agnostic and therefore are only suitable for a small percentage of games
- Difficulty in extending to a specific game due to lack of code understanding
- Difficulty in integrating other tools and middleware
- Availability of source code
We take it as a badge of pride that our technology has been used in 15 separate genres in over 300 games to great success all over the world. We are enjoying incredible market adoption to no small extent because our code is documented, commented, well structured and flexible. We have a very aggressive partnership program with 17 partner integrations. Virtually all of our partners tell us how easy it is to integrate with our technology, not to mention how excited they are about our new plug in architecture and entity modeling system. And of course, source code is available to licensed game developers.
As our industry navigates through these difficult economic times, we believe the creative, financial and technological opportunities available to the industry are unparalleled. We think that this is the beginning of a new level of creativity, maturity and evolution for all of us. We call it the new face of AAA. As a result of this belief Emergent Game Technologies has begun to work even more closely with the development community in very tangible ways.
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Emergent's Support - A Deep Collaboration
In the coming months you will witness an unprecedented difference between Emergent and other technology providers in the way we support the companies working with Emergent and Gamebryo LightSpeed. Our new support forum, PULSE, which provides fantastic community tools providing support of training, sharing of libraries, code samples updates and more, has just launched. Our vision is to provide unrivaled support and collaboration to our licensees as we grow our game technology initiative. We have embarked on a partnership with our developers supporting them in solving such fundamental challenges as core technology, innovative game design, marketing strategy, financing alternatives, and introductions to publishers, all designed to provide a better chance for the long term success of their studio s. We believe in constant technology evolution driven by a deep collaboration between our core engineering team and the community of developers. This unprecedented partnership with the industry, combined with our world class technology, will drive innovation as we collectively begin to create the next generation of AAA titles.
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I look forward to meeting or speaking with you at some point about the opportunities and challenges you are facing in 2009, and to share with you my ideas of how Emergent and Gamebryo LightSpeed can help shape the future of video games.
Geoffrey Selzer
Chairman & CEO
Emergent Game Technologies