Looking for blue ocean look to the cloud rhys dekle
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"The trends in cloud based gaming are changing the way developers make games and the games developers make. This raises fresh opportunities for creativity in game and business design. • Cloud gaming means much more than streaming which has come a long way but still faces well-known challenges to ubiquity. • Developers today face a creative crisis just as big as their discovery crisis. • The tools and middleware which rose to prominence in the last console generation are just beginning to embrace the cloud and that is changing the way that developers make and support games for the better. • The cloud’s unique characteristics offer a fresh challenge to game developers to make new and better games. I’ll review some of the unexplored territory and discuss lessons learned and tips from the early explorers in cloud based game design. The trends in cloud based gaming are changing the way developers make games and the games developers make. This raises fresh opportunities for creativity in game and business design. • Cloud gaming means much more than streaming which has come a long way but still faces well-known challenges to ubiquity. • Developers today face a creative crisis just as big as their discovery crisis. • The tools and middleware which rose to prominence in the last console generation are just beginning to embrace the cloud and that is changing the way that developers make and support games for the better. • The cloud’s unique characteristics offer a fresh challenge to game developers to make new and better games. I’ll review some of the unexplored territory and discuss lessons learned and tips from the early explorers in cloud based game design. The trends in cloud based gaming are changing the way developers make games and the games developers make. This raises fresh opportunities for creativity in game and business design. • Cloud gaming means much more than streaming which has come a long way but still faces well-known challenges to ubiquity. • Developers today face a creative crisis just as big as their discovery crisis. • The tools and middleware which rose to prominence in the last console generation are just beginning to embrace the cloud and that is changing the way that developers make and support games for the better. • The cloud’s unique characteristics offer a fresh challenge to game developers to make new and better games. I’ll review some of the unexplored territory and discuss lessons learned and tips from the early explorers in cloud based game design."
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Looking for blue ocean look to the cloud rhys dekle
- 1. PURSUING BLUE OCEANS IN THE CLOUD
- 2. Why Am I Here?
- 3. Who Am I Anyway? William Rhys Dekle wdekle@microsoft.com 12 years in the game industry: • Director of Merchandising Games, Hollywood Entertainment • Senior Director, Worldwide Business Development, Microsoft (Game) Studios Prior experience: coffee shop manager, construction worker, park ranger, medical researcher, factory inspector in Japan, employee 13 in an engineering startup and a management consultant for fortune 500 companies
- 4. Who I Am Not Today For any of my friends in the Press here. I am not speaking as a representative of Microsoft today. I am speaking as a game industry observer and concerned community member. Please reflect that if you decide to write about what I say. Today’s talk based on research conducted in the wider video game industry including: • Game Developers of all sizes • Middleware and Game Development Tool companies • Executives at Cloud service companies
- 5. Cloud Gaming Is More Than Streaming Does streaming work? YES Will it get even better? YES • BUT CLOUD GAMING IS MORE THAN STREAMING! It’s a disruptive technology for game development and games themselves!!! • The Cloud is changing game development • The Cloud is changing game design
- 6. Cloud computing as an innovation must enable less skilled or less wealthy developers to receive the same utility as was previously available only to more skilled or more wealthy developers. Applied from Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen in “The Rules of Innovation” on how to tell a disruptive technology
- 7. Let’s Talk About Some Trends In the past decade we have seen: • The rise of tools & middleware – lowers costs, increases focus on product differentiation • The industry acceptance of outsourcing – lowers costs, provides scale while minimizing risk • Distributed development – enables development of complex AAA games and the virtual indie developer • The growth of digital distribution-web game portals, XBLA, Steam, mobile app stores • The fragmentation of game platforms – From Console&Handheld&PC to mobile&tablet&facebook&flash • The migration of games as product to games as service – allows developers to fight piracy and compete against network effects of successful incumbents • The reincarnation of the small developer (teams < 10 people)
- 8. What Happens When Trends Meet Cloud • Middleware products become services and services become more powerful and more affordable for smaller players • Geographically dispersed developers demand and receive greater collaboration solutions • Easy scalability becomes available to everyone – The risk of your self-hosting servers being overwhelmed by demand is offset by virtual machines • Games evolve from products to services • Demand for new specialized services created (analytics, CRM, customer support, A/B testing, deployment, billing, etc)
- 9. Game Development Is Changing • Geographic coordination becomes easier
- 10. Game Development Is Changing • Power and speed of development increases as costs per developer go down
- 11. Game Development Is Changing • Power and speed of development increases as costs per developer go down "The goal of Cloud Build is to take the pain out of producing and maintaining successful cross-platform games," said Todd Hooper, VP of Online Services, Unity Technologies. "By streamlining the production process in the cloud, Unity is putting studios large and small in a position to give more time toward their creative processes and deliver amazing games that keep gamers coming back for more."
- 12. Game Development Is Changing • Power and speed of development increases as costs per developer go down
- 13. Game Development Is Changing • Easy scalability – no more day one “stock outs”
- 14. Game Development Is Changing • Backend complexity and costs reduced by specialized third party services: multiplayer hosting, deployment, customer support, analytics, distribution, monetization, a/b testing
- 15. But the most important point is the last one • The cloud allows teams to focus on differentiation and not reinventing the wheel
- 16. Your Opportunity & Challenge • Ubiquity, • Persistence • Scalability • Machine learning • High performance computation The point is not distribution of games through the cloud The point is our ability to make different games because of the cloud
- 17. Your Opportunity & Your Challenge • Procedural Audio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a9Ai0odHvI • Procedural Content Generation • Dynamic tutorials • Intelligent NPC adjustment – Another application of drivatars to know the player and make the game adjust to improve individual players experience • Same persistent world, people interacting through different platforms • Using the detritus of other player’s previous games as fodder for another player’s game. Or the products of player’s game from a different game on a different device as fodder for another player’s game. • Helm’s deep hordes of NPC’s in a mobile game
- 18. Your Opportunity & Your Challenge II • Massive persistent maps –Games that create history • Completely destructible environments (with persistence) • NPC AI designed by armies of volunteer testers • Collaborative distributed modding • Map design – instead of spreading players out, there is economy in clustering players together
- 19. A Collection of Old and New Business Models • Free to Play / Pay as you go • Pay as you go / Metered time • Subscription • Advertising • Rent-a-server / the Country Club Model • Revenue sharing from UGC /Mods • Upgrade to quality • Download to own???
- 20. Advice From The Pioneers • Don’t be afraid to try. If you can build a game for a PC, you can build a game for the cloud • Brainstorm ways you can use resources outside of the device you are running on for your game • Divide your ideas between those where latency matters and where it does not • Early iterative prototyping to get design in the mindset of what is unique about the cloud • Build or take advantage of automated systems to build, deploy, test, and iterate in the cloud • Depending on your game search for optimizations that can help your game reduce cost
- 21. Questions? William Rhys Dekle Senior Director, WW Business Development Microsoft Studios wdekle@microsoft.com
- 22. APPENDIX
- 23. Game Development Is Changing • Geographic coordination is becoming easier • Power and speed of development increases as costs per developer go down • Easy scalability – no more day one “stock outs” • Backend complexity and costs reduced by specialized third party services • Developers allowed to focus on differentiation not revinventing the wheel
- 24. Game Development Is Changing • Easy scalability – no more day one “stock outs” Austin, Texas–based Sneaky Games develops games for social media platforms—primarily Facebook—and mobile platforms. The company supports 2.7 million registered game players and has 22 employees. “We switched from creating web-based games for very targeted audiences, which had tens of thousands of users, to developing social media games, which have the potential to attract millions of users at the same time—that was scary for us,” says Godwin. “If one of our games really takes off, the ability to scale up rapidly is very important to our success as a company.” - Sneaky Games, 2012 Sneaky Games takes advantage of the pay-as-you-go-model that their Cloud service company offers, ensuring that it only pays for the services that it uses. This gives the company an affordable, right-size infrastructure—an infrastructure that is neither under-utilized nor over-taxed. At the same time, the pay-as-you-go model helps the company predict revenue growth with more accuracy because its infrastructure costs are directly proportionate to its revenue. “By using the Cloud, we do not have to hire additional personnel to maintain our infrastructure, no matter how much it grows”. “Our existing IT staff can easily keep up with our development cycle.” In addition, Sneaky Games can scale down its infrastructure as demand dictates and avoid paying for infrastructure that it no longer needs.
Editor's Notes
- I’m tired of people talking about gaming in the cloud and missing the part I find most exciting I keep waiting for someone to talk about it but finally I got fed up and decided to do it myself
- My name is Rhys Dekle, I have been in the industry for 12 years including as a Director of Merchandising Games for Hollywood Entertainment where I owned the Video Rental business for Hollywood Video. This including running a purchasing organization that was one of the top ten buyers of video games in the United States. Following this and for the last 10 years I have worked in business development at Microsoft Studios. In this role I manage a team of bizdev people who make their living by knowing the best game developers in the world, being the first to listen to their game pitches, and looking for games that make sense for Microsoft to publish to our platforms including Xbox and Windows and negotiating those deals. Prior to all of this I did a variety of different things including coffee shop manager, construction worker, park ranger, medical researcher, factory inspector in Japan. I did the startup thing as employee #13 in an engineering startup, equity sales & trading, and management consulting. I have a twisted academic history as well with a BA in Anthropology and an MBA in Finance. Not something one sees every day I guess. But though I know the game industry through and through and because I haven’t grown up as part of the game industry it makes it possible for me to step out of the industry and try to see it objectively against the pattern of what else is going on in other industries. That’s where today’s talk comes from.
- Disclaimer. In case there are any press here, I would ask you to recognize that I am here today as a game industry observer and concerned community member not as an official Microsoft representative. My views are my own and not necessarily those of my organization. I would ask that you reflect that if you decide to write about what I say. The topic I am discussing here today is based on research I conducted in the larger game industry not restricted to Microsoft contacts. To prepare for this presentation I have spoken with game developers of all sizes – both indie and non as well as middleware and game development tool companies and with executives at various cloud service companies.
- Streaming services exist and when you say cloud gaming, they get the lions share of the attention. They deliver services today to varying levels of user satisfaction depending on what specific part of the world you live in and what kind of household you live in and what type of gamer you are. Will streaming continue to improve in the future? Undoubtedly “yes”. Everything in the cloud will continue to improve. But my whole point today is simple – the Cloud is so much more than streaming. No offense, streaming service providers in the audience. The cloud is a disruptive technology for game development and games themselves. The cloud is already changing game development and it is starting to change game design. It isn’t widely acknowledged yet but it will be in the next couple of years. The cloud is rapidly climbing the innovation curve and the period of initial expense is over. Developers I spoke with said that the cost of cloud services go down so rapidly and by such degrees that they cannot finish a short cost saving exercise on their game without having a new price reduction make their work pointless. As prices come down the accessibility of the cloud becomes undeniable. As more and more developers adopt the cloud for the reasons I discuss in this talk, it will become a necessary component of every company’s technology infrastructure just to stay competitive.
- I want to begin by talking about some long term trends. Like storm clouds in the distance, I saw many of these trends beginning about a decade ago when the PS2 ruled the Earth and Xbox began experimenting with a little service called Xbox Live. These are the key trends I see and their consequences. The rise of tools & middleware – when I began as a biz-dev guy 10 years ago, commercial engines were trying to prove themselves. Developers wrote impassioned letters to game magazines stating that only proprietary engines could deliver distinctive look and feel and gameplay. Commercial engines make your games bland they said. Most developers had their “proprietary” engines at that time. People were starting to get convinced that commercial tools for physics or illumination or audio or foliage were a good idea and not cheating. Forward 10 years to today and commercial tools and middleware have lowered cost and improved productivity at big developers and publishers and have become so inexpensive and fees so backended that small developers have not only survived, many have flourished. Outsourcing – similar story with outsourcing. A decade ago, only one or two of our internal teams were looking at outsourcing and only for the most extraneous game assets. Today we have a group dedicated to scouring the world every year looking for the best outsourcers and recommending them to any internal studio that has a need which is every studio we have. Again lower costs, providing muscles to scale up production while minimizing the risk. Distributed Development – Used to be a studio pitched a game, they made the game. Publishers helped them make the game. That was it. But the world has truly flattened for game development. From Buenos Aires to Warsaw to Kuala Lumpur to Nanjing and every city in between those there are developers working on the franchises we all know and adore alongside the studios who get the lionshare of the credit. I worked on a project a couple of years ago can’t name it, but at one point we must have had 12 entities around the world working on the game simultaneously. Some working on modes of the game some working on art or networking some designing downloadable content and some working cinematics. After the project was over, the EP of the project said to me “never again”. And I said, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but it isn’t never again, it’s forever more”. And it isn’t just big games, it’s little ones too. Distributed development has enabled development of increasingly complex AAA games and allowed the formation of many small virtual indie developers.
- So I’d like to quickly go over what happens when these trends meet the Cloud. Interesting things happen / are happening.
- Distributed development is a trend whether you are looking at how many different development teams are collaborating on AAA title like Call of Duty or at a small indie developer like Spry Fox which has openly talked about being a distributed studio where employees and contractors check-in from around the world every day. Thanks to the fantastic collaboration tools and services that live in the cloud – the risk and complexity of global development is being mitigated. This has had a significant impact on the global search for talent. Biz Dev guys like me no longer are limited to looking for developers in the same time zone as the primary developer and guys like David Edery, CEO of SpryFox can hire a programmer in Australia and sleep at night.
- Tool and middleware business model changes away from the “$ per seat” model and towards the “pay as you go” or subscription model But the power of tools and middleware increase as more heavy lifting gets done in the cloud faster. And as more developers use the services in the cloud, the scale benefits will continue to drive the cost down further prompting even more developers to use the services. What happens when animations are no longer done on a high end computer in the developer’s office but are sent off to be massively parallel processed in the cloud? Hours of development time are saved with each job. HOURS with EACH job.
- In this multiplatform world of game development, what happens when teams no longer have to rely on local builds but have them in the cloud and automated through a service like Tsugi which Unity purchased this year – As Ryan Payton of Camoflaj building the game Republique stated his team has gone from 2 or 3 builds a day to 20 builds a day. A 10X increase. What happens when Chinese art and development outsourcers no longer have a shortage of console dev kits because their dev kits are virtual and in the cloud? Massive productivity gains because the constraint on the human end of the art pipeline goes away.
- And of course, let’s not forget Rendering in the cloud – developers now have the ability to make high-definition, photorealistic images that were previously incredibly slow and expensive relying purely on the hardware in your office – and they make these images in less time. That is higher quality in less time available at a cost for the computing time you actually use. The practical benefits of cloud based development technology go on and on. There is not a game development tool or engine out there that is not in some way contemplating what the cloud represents to their business and their business model. Virtually every product we developers rely on is transforming into a cloud service in some way, shape, or form around us. For some middleware companies they are doing it themselves and figuring it out. For others, their clients are doing the heavy lifting whether it is Rendering, Audio, AI, Physics, Illumination, Animation, Collaboration, Collision. The clients themselves are making the software work in the cloud and the way that middleware license contracts work such derivative improvements are owned by the middleware companies themselves.
- Without the cloud, developers had to make a best guess about how many people would play their game. If you guessed too high, you were stuck with the bill. If you guessed too low, you missed sales and it can be difficult to get those people you turned away to come back. The cloud is great for developers of online games because it mitigates these risks effectively. Developers are just getting away from the dedicated server model to the cloud model at least for launch of the game. It is a telling thing in cloud economics that many developers find it economically advantageous to manage their own servers once an online game is in a steady state with predictable concurrency. Yet this phenomenon will diminish as usage of the cloud continues to increase and competition drives prices down.
- As development rushes to embrace cloud based development, games are increasingly becoming services and as such they need a rich ecosystem of specialized services to cater to them. Sure a game developer could do any of these things by themselves but the hefty cost of re-inventing the wheel and not having a scale advantage for things like payment systems make such a do it myself strategy questionable. This growing ecosystem is a virtual Galapagos of adaptation, innovation, and industry. There is incredible energy being thrown at building businesses to serve game and app developers in the backend service portion of development
- Nothing about cloud development suggests that the ratio of programmers to designers or producers will change radically. Developers today are used to multi-threaded development and the skill set for 4 cores is basically not different from 50 cores. Contrary to what you might think, the cloud is probably most challenging for Designers
- This sets up the introduction to new areas for game play exploitation: the same technologies that improve the productivity of game development when applied to the cloud are also runtime tools like AI, physics, destruction, audio and the cloud changes the way designers need to craft gameplay if they ask themselves the question what can I do differently? The special attributes of the Cloud and Cloud Compute such as ubiquity, persistence, scalability, machine learning, high performance computation change the kind of games we should make. Initially much of the changes will be applied toward multiplayer gaming because it is cost efficient but as cloud computing costs come down we expect changes to sweep into single player games as well.
- The same tools that make game development better, faster, cheaper change the games we can make. The special attributes of the Cloud and Cloud Compute (ubiquity, persistence, scalability, machine learning, high performance computation) change the kind of games we should make. There are more developers on earth today than ten years ago. Competition is fierce. And while creativity flourishes, let’s face it there are a lot of “me too” and copycat games out there. The best salvation for any game developer is making polished unique game experiences. And that often calls for going in search of the blue ocean – the part of the ocean where everyone else is not. Today the cloud is one big blue ocean. Speaking to different developers, these are some of the fascinating ideas that came up as possibilities to exploit. Here are just a few of them. Speak on examples such as procedural audio, massive destructible persistent maps, map and multiplayer design, AI design through machine learning of human interaction, dynamic tutorials, intelligent npc adjustment,
- As most games will be service based games, one expects free to play as a predominant business model One we may see crop up is pay as you go or metered time like in prepaid phones today Subscription will still exist for a few premium MMOs but less for individual games than for access to a collection of games such as the Netflix model Advertising will still fund games catered toward large audiences such as social games Charging for gated worlds – renting virtual servers a la Minecraft – like my neighborhood kids keeping them safe; there will also be payments to play within certain gated communities of expert players or like-minded players (the country club model) Revenue sharing from UGC and sales of mods will become popular and the commercial middleware engines need to facilitate this in their model Quality tiering where a user gets a 10 core experience of a game as base level but can upgrade to a premium 50 core experience (the movie versus IMAX or 3D example) Perhaps the business model that makes the least sense through the cloud will be the download to own model
- Geographic coordination is becoming easier – significant impact on talent search and team formation and supply and competition of outsourcers Power and speed of development increases as costs per developer go down
- Without the cloud, developers had to make a best guess about how many people would play their game. If you guessed too high, you were stuck with the bill. If you guessed too low, you missed sales and it can be difficult to get those people you turned away to come back. The cloud is great for developers of online games because it mitigates these risks effectively. Developers are just getting away from the dedicated server model to the cloud model at least for launch of the game. It is a telling thing in cloud economics that many developers find it economically advantageous to manage their own servers once an online game is in a steady state with predictable concurrency.