HeadGames aims to give game firms a head start on deadlines

An Ottawa firm hopes to be the outsourcing provider of choice for the Canadian videogame industry with a new business aimed at time- and resource-starved developers. "The game industry is...traditionally not strong with process, strong with tool use, strong with serious development," says bitHeads Inc. president, CEO and co-founder Scott Simpson, on the phone from San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference. His firm was rolling out its new HeadGames business unit at the event, which ran from March 5 to 8.The company isn't necessarily looking to replace full-time workers, Simpson adds, but rather allow companies to augment their staff with outside specialists. "In a lot of cases we're basically working side-by-side with the company's own application developers managing the project itself," he adds.HeadGames promises more than mere outsourcing of labour requirements, however. Simpson says that thanks to bitHeads' work with leading telecom and IT firms such as 3Com, Research in Motion and IBM, the company has an arsenal of methodology, processes and tools that can be ported to the gaming space and brought to bear to help developers meet even the most pressing deadline.It's usually those deadlines - mostly around key retailer buying periods - that cause game companies to ship titles before all the bugs have been worked out. "Nobody cares about that - they just care whether or not it's going to be on the store shelves by Thanksgiving so they can sell it for Christmas," Simpson says."When they're getting the development shops to do the work, it's one- or two-person - guys in a garage doing their stuff," he says. Regardless of whether the outsourced portion is for the art, sound, application development a game involves, HeadGames can manage the entire project so studios can clearly see whether they're on track to meet a release date and other key milestones, explains Simpson.To compound matters for developers, the increasing complexity of games means that their architectures are growing in scope and function as well, incorporating transaction systems, databases, communications protocols and more. That means more work to be done - and more temptation to take short-cuts. "As games are getting more multi-player and more server-based, the more things are outside your own PC. A lot of that stuff requires some pretty serious framework and communication mechanisms and things," he says.And while bitHead's client roster in other industries might talk of "five-nines uptime" and "mission-critical applications," reliability and rock-solid performance are no less critical to game developers, whose reputation can be shot in the close-knit and rumour-driven world of game fanatics by one bad experience with a title."The last thing you want to be doing as a player is lose your connection with the network," Simpson adds. "Obviously, network outages happen...but if that's a software problem it's pretty serious."HeadGames also has a consulting angle to it: the firm can be brought in as a process expert by a publisher, for instance, to audit how efficiently a developer is operating and working toward a certain goal, an important service for those with capital of any description invested. "Whether that's a VC or whether that's a games publisher, it's sort of the same value proposition," Simpson says.

HeadGames aims to give game firms a head start on deadlines

Broadcast | March 30, 2007

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