Establishing the Future

While there continue to be an increasing number of impressive game development achievements in narrative story, visuals, technology, gameplay mechanics, and user interface, the games industry has yet to bridge the gap between $40-$60 entertainment software products, that last a 4-8 hour day-trip and serious games products that can last as long as there are people and organizations that require training for very important tasks, jobs, and events.

The entertainment software sector has developed some wonderful technologies and production techniques which collaborate to support a dwindling number of truly original IPs. The serious games sector has a veritable cornucopia of original, real world ideas that are ripe for immediate production but lack the development personnel, techniques, and tools that saturate the entertainment sector.

One sector lacks what the other needs and vice versa.  The logical solution brings these two sectors together towards a mutually beneficial partnership of generating an entirely new wave of original IP, imaginatively feeding off real world content, creating training and employment opportunities for an incredible number of people who are ready for a new start, or looking to enhance their specific skills, in today’s local and global economies.

While this potential business relationship hinges on the willing engagement of these two parties, the real end effector resides within the individual game developers whose general preference, understandably, is to develop something entertaining and cool, rather than meaningful and cool. Many game developers, to be fair, spend every waking hour building what is meaningful to them, and when you get that kind of opportunity, you want to hold onto it for dear life.

On the other hand, game developers could also be pouring the same quality and development effort into elegant and well-balanced training simulations that will simply be life-altering to a much larger audience on a much broader scale than many of their previous efforts have reached. And, in today’s world, we are seeing more often than not that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.” – Spock from Star Trek.

I have been around the block a few times, developing a wide variety of entertainment and serious games products. After almost 19 years in the games industry, beautiful-yet-meaningful products are both achievable by developers and attainable by fully-funded clients. There is also plenty of room in the games industry for products that place fundamentals and function before fluff but not in the absence of it.

You can make a status quo attempt to create more value within your day-trip game product by leveraging it across multiple hardware platforms, or, you can develop it to provide more value and have a much greater long-term effect on the user from the very beginning. Serious games are a primed-and-ready vehicle for giving everyone associated with game development (clients, developers, and users) what they need and want. I am ready to drive. How about you?

If you are a serious client in need of a serious developer capable of transforming your serious concepts into serious games, utilizing some of the most experienced talent and refined techniques from any sector of game development, I encourage you to contact me at emscharf@emscharf.com or 443-797-2236 to draw up an agreement and begin planning your products in earnest.

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