Entertainment Technology Advisor

The mantra at the beginning of 2009 was that the game industry was recession-proof. That concept died a spectacular death just a few short months later. What does that mean for the game middleware industry? Nothing good. The second half was brutal for some providers as the game pipeline dried up. Developers and publishers became extremely skittish about taking risks on anything but known entities. That helped send the industry into a spiral as gamers looking to spend money did not find the slate of titles very interesting.

This has brought growth in the game middleware industry to a screeching halt. Instead of looking for the next great console game many publishers and developers are looking toward casual and mobile gaming as a way to make money while investing little in game development.

The silver lining in this cloud is that middleware makers will continue to innovate through these tough times. Those that come out the other side will have product ready and waiting when developers and publishers start ramping up their console and PC pipeline. When that happens time to market will be critical. Developers are likely to come knocking looking for help to get their games out the door as quickly as possible.

In our latest report Middleware for Interactive Entertainment 2009 we forecast the impact of the economy on the leading sectors of the game middleware market including game, physics, artificial intelligence, and network engines. We also provide detailed analysis on the number of games and SKUs released each year and insight into what game engines are in use in these games.

For over a decade the game middleware industry has been fighting the attitude from game developers that they can make their own technology better, faster, and cheaper. While that is a debatable position, it is not a debatable attitude. But, could it be that the meltdown of the financial industry will have the unintended side effect of making developers more willing to purchase off the shelf middleware solutions? I know, crazy. But before you start asking me what I am smoking and where I got it let me lay it out for you. A big developer/publisher cancels a game. The team could be deployed to another game, but the developer decides they are going to take the opportunity to say good bye to team members that are making “too much money” (now remember this is from the developer/publisher’s point of view not the guy making the money). So, for the next game they bring in a new team member just out of school whom they can pay much less. Short term gain maybe, but they lose all of the experience from that team. Where does that team go? Well, how about a new independent development studio. They are popping up all over, and what they know is that they do not have the engineering resources to build a game engine, AI, physics, interface, and so on technology to develop a game. They have a small window of opportunity before they have to start filling out applications to the local Starbucks. That means they have to buy the technology.

Add in new distribution opportunities and models and you have new cycle of independent game developers who just might be more open to middleware this time around.

I may be crazy! I’d love to hear what you think.

Christine

Natural Motion
NaturalMotion Releases morpheme 2.0 with NVIDIA PhysX

NDS
Tele Columbus and PrimaCom Choose NDS MediaHighway
NDS End-to-End Solution Powers and Protects Mediascape’s New Digital DTH Service for the Philippines
NDS, News Corporation and Permira Announce the Successful Completion of the Transaction to Take NDS Private

Nuance
Nuance Announces Mobile Developers Program
Nuance Unveils NVC 2.0 For Mass Market Mobile Devices

OC3 Entertainment
Video Game Technology Used to Help Children with Autism

Ocean Blue Software
Ocean Blue Software Launches the World’s First Application and a Complete Software Product Designed to CI+ Specifications

OpenTV
OpenTV Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2008 Results-- Achieves First Year of Profitability

PathEngine
SDK Release 5.19

Qualcomm
MediaFLO USA Set to Expand FLO TV in More Than 100 Markets in 2009

Trinigy
Trinigy Announces Entertainment Stimulus Package

Here's a quick round up of what middleware companies have been announcing this month:

+7Systems
MrJoy Taps +7 Systems to Automate Game Balance

Dolby
Dolby Previews New Technology for Mobile Entertainment at Mobile World Congress
Dolby Laboratories Reports First Quarter Fiscal 2009 Results

Emergent
Emergent Game Technologies Raises $12.5 Million in Funding

Ensequence
Ensequence Awarded U.S. Patent for Technology that Enables Interactive TV to Scale, Transform Ads

Fonix
Fonix Software Available in Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. Video Game
GaozhiSoft Acquisition Update
Fonix iSpeak -- Spanish, German and French now available for the Apple iPhone 3G

GameSpy
Gamespy Announces Major Upgrade to Atlas Competition System
Gamespy Technology Launches New In-Game Commerce Engine, Direct2Game
Scaleform and Gamespy Launch Comprehensive In-Game Lobby Solution

Minerva
Latens and Minerva Networks extend close integration of CAS and IPTV Middleware
Minerva Adds Three New Channel Partners in Latin America

I was a little surprised to read today that The Game Creators has added support for AGEIA's PhysX physics processor to its DarkBASIC Professional product. Never heard of it? It is, in amateur developer circles anyway, a pretty well-known compiled BASIC language - with support for 2D and 3D graphics (even rudimentary shaders), audio, input, networking, etc. The language itself is a bit ideosyncratic but it is actually pretty powerful. As an occasional user I've made a couple of 'interactive dioramas' with DarkBASIC but the TGC user base has turned out some fairly impressive demos and games.

A lot of you in the professional development space are probably wondering why the heck I'm even bothering writing about this. I'll tell you. Because the amateur market isn't entirely insignificant and a good living can be had for a smaller company with the right strategies (which TGC definitely has). A couple of years ago we published a market study on amateur/independent game development. If we're still on track with our original projections, revenue from content and code tools should be just topping $40 million this year.

And, I think we're still on track.

Why? Because no one has really stepped up to the plate to change the way the game is played in any significant way. $40 mil. isn't a lot of money, to be sure, but we think that figure could be a whole lot more with the right products, pricing, and marketing. The big guys occasionally dabble: Autodesk/discreet's GMax, Caligari's gameSpace, etc. Even so, they've all managed to take a fundamentally incorrect approach - looking at products for the market either as training-wheel-ware with no true here-and-now useability or simply splitting off product-light versions from their real code base, with no real support. We won't even talk about pricing decisions.

Emergent's John Austin and others have predicted a time when tools and middleware will offer the ability for non-rocket scientists to make a game. I agree. But, and it's a big one, someone's got to start looking at democratizing the technologies for more than a handful of people to ever get their hands on this kind of power.
More later,
M

A little follow-up: Looks like some TGC forum members have their knickers in a twist trying to understand the AGEIA licensing guidelines, though a TGC rep notes that there will soon be some official explanation on the AGEIA site. Hopefully this will address how indy shareware developers can qualify to sell titles that use Dark Physics with hardware support. If nothing else, though, many of the posts show the difficulties a toolmaker can face when working with the amateur/indy community. It's hard to know when to take the views seriously and when to tell them to RTFM (or STFU as the case may be.)