Microsoft's Games Get Serious

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These incidents, along with the ongoing requests for Flight Simulator to be licensed or adapted for corporate and other nonentertainment uses—and a series of 250 interviews Microsoft conducted with members of the U.S. military and various international governments and academic institutions—convinced the software maker that the market was real and serious games were worth pursuing.

Besides, Flight Simulator already had 25 years of proven audience popularity and brand equity. To open up its game engine and remarket it as a tool was a cost-effective way for Microsoft to enter the field. Boker said it took only nine months total to develop and launch ESP, repurposing the game's software and graphics as a training tool for professional pilots.

Time and Money Saved

Observers see Microsoft's new involvement as a possible tipping point for serious games—and as a sign that entertainment video game developers, publishers, and designers could also repurpose their products and game engines to generate new revenue streams. Already, companies have experimented with licensing and repurposing other entertainment-game engines for employee training. Siemens (SI), for example, licensed the Meqon physics engine licensed from physics-accelerator-card maker AGEIA, which was used in the development of the first-person shooter game TimeShift (BusinessWeek.com, 3/7/07). "This is a sign that investment in gaming technology is paying off in other ways," says Digitallmill's Sawyer.

Using Microsoft ESP could also pay off for the companies that opt to use it in terms of time and money saved when creating employee-training games. Northrop Grumman, for instance, has been beta-testing the ESP platform and its early incarnations for the past several months. It saw significant slashes in budgets and schedules. One team used ESP to create a prototype of an aviation simulation training game—in only three days.

"Typically, the same type of simulation would have taken six to 18 months to make from scratch," says Randy Schmidt, a technical director at Northrop Grumman. "I was surprised." Schmidt says the Windows-based platform and the easy-to-use interface of the software made it simple to choose from a library of cockpit, terrain, and other design elements—all originally created for the Flight Simulator video game—and combine them with Northrop Grumman's own visuals and software.

New Kid on the Block

Schmidt adds that to build a complete training aviation simulation—beyond the prototype phase—with realistic 3D graphics from scratch and for a military customer, could still cost well into the tens of millions of dollars. But the cost savings, in terms of purchasing the $799 license for Microsoft ESP that can be used for multiple serious games, is vast, he says. The Windows interface is designed so that in-house designers can create a simulation without writing new code (so no expense of hiring an outside developer). "The entertainment-game graphics are quite realistic," he says. "Some of the military sims look like poor-man's versions of video games."

But Schmidt also says Northrop Grumman won't stop experimenting with other serious games platforms. The company is still seeing how it can use the online virtual world Second Life for training games. Northrop Grumman is also continuing to work with Hunt Valley (Md.)-based Breakaway Ltd., which makes a competing do-it-yourself software platform called mosbe that allows companies to create custom training games, and which has a long history of creating training sims for the military, hospitals, and even bank auditors and consulting firms such as Booz Allen Hamilton.