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Grid computing plays games

David Becker CNET News.com

Published: 04 Jun 2004 12:35 BST

Playing with outsourcing
One of the most significant changes in the game industry includes a new willingness by developers -- once epitomised by do-it-yourself perfectionists such as Id Software's John Carmack -- to look at outsourcing.

Online game-playing has multiplied the complexity of the game-creation process and prodded developers to think about what they're best at, said David Cole, founder of research firm DFC Intelligence.

"One of the big challenges people are realising with online games is that it's a completely different business and a whole new skill set from offline games," he said. "You're not shipping a product as much as creating a service and a backbone that needs regular maintenance and updating. It's a big headache and not necessarily something that gives you a competitive advantage if you do all the networking chores on your own."

Canepa said game makers have seen that outsourcing can give them more time to focus on creative tasks. "You ask yourself, 'do I really want to invest a lot of time and money in managing this infrastructure?'" he said. "As the game firms are busy building their brand strategies and game platforms... I think they'll increasingly turn to us to handle some of the fundamental blocking and tackling."

Dave Cerra, chief executive and executive producer of game maker Sojourn Development, said industry attitudes toward outsourcing began changing several years ago with the advent of ready-made middleware to handle complex visual and computational tasks such as rendering and in-game physics. Developers have become comfortable with the idea they can make distinctive games using off-the-shelf tools, and now the outsourcing approach is extending to online components.

"It's just not really viable anymore to do everything on your own," he said. "You have to consider if it's more cost-effective for somebody in my shoes to say, 'I'm going to spend massive amounts of cash doing something completely homegrown... or do I just focus on the core competency of this company?'"