2005 C.I.P.A. Winners

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Activision Canada/Beenox

Simultaneous Cross-Platform Game Development

California-based Activision Inc. is an internationally recognized publisher of high-quality video games that operate on game consoles such as PlayStation2, Xbox and Nintendo GameCube, on handheld devices such as Nintendo Game Boy Advance, Sony PlayStation Portable and Nintendo Dual Screen as well as on personal computers.

In May 2005, Activision acquired game developer Beenox Inc. of Quebec City, giving Activision access to Quebec, one of the fastest growing development talent pools in North America, and solidifying a well-established relationship between the two firms. For the past three years, Beenox has been providing services to Activision by adapting or "porting" games from the game console environment to run in the Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh environments.

Challenge

In the video-game development business, two challenges have historically made it difficult for game publishers to realize full profit potential from games running on Windows or Macintosh personal computers, resulting in PC games often taking a back seat to console-based games.

The first of these is the complexity and cost of porting console games to PCs because of the vast array of hardware combinations that need to be supported. While the hardware that makes up game consoles remains fixed throughout their typical five-year lifecycle, the hardware used to build PCs is anything but fixed.

"New graphics cards, memory, input devices and other hardware components are continuously being added to PCs, offering more and more features," says Paul Gadbois, game producer at Beenox. "This makes the game developer's task far more complicated - like trying to hit and keep up with a moving target."

The other challenge facing game publishers is to release PC versions of games in time to take advantage of the huge investment in advertising and promotion that usually accompanies the release of the original console-based games. A development group may need to add 10 to 15 developers to handle the porting of the console-based game to a PC platform, and still not complete the task for an additional six months - too late to ride the wave of hype and sales energy created for the original console game release.

Objectives

With a growing number of video games platforms available, and another generation of platforms at the doorstep, cross-platform game development - specifically, porting games from consoles to PCs - is becoming increasingly expensive and even more complex. As a result, more and more publishers are turning to outside development shops to migrate their console games on to PC platforms.

The Beenox porting division of Activision is one such shop; and through some innovative thinking and development work, Beenox set out to create a unique, new cross-platform game development process and tool set that would enable publishers to develop new games on all platforms - including PCs - simultaneously.

Solution

Details of the technology are proprietary, but essentially the Beenox simultaneous cross-platform game development solution is based on building a transformation layer on top of the original console game code. The primary benefit of the Beenox porting solution is that it doesn't require the original game code to be touched, so the porting can be done while the base console game is still under development. It takes only two or three Beenox software engineers to port a console game and at a fraction of the traditional production cost; and they can have it ready for release within two weeks following release of the base console game.

"Most of the porting effort goes into handling the graphics and input devices, such as game pads, keyboards, mice and joysticks, that need to be handled differently in the PC environment," explains Gadbois.

By pairing up world-class game developers with Beenox's porting technology and team of cross-platform game development experts, publishers like Activision can release their biggest titles simultaneously on multiple platforms. And by facilitating concurrent release of PC game versions in different languages, the Beenox technology also enables publishers to expand their market to virtually anywhere in the world.

Innovative Use of Technology

Unique technology and a highly effective production process enables Beenox to help publishers bring more games to more markets, at a lower cost and without the usual hassles associated with cross-platform game development. Beenox's port of The Incredibles, for example, only required an average of four people to produce the 25 versions of the game in 13 different languages.

"Where the biggest publishers saw a problem, we saw an opportunity - and seized it", exclaims Gadbois.

In addition, a study of the Quebec interactive gaming industry, conducted by the consultancy firm SECOR, indicated that one of the challenges facing game-development shops is to recruit young graduates with an adequate academic background. Beenox's innovative porting technology and developer training program not only make the simultaneous cross-platform game development process a reality, but also enable young, inexperienced programmers to be hired.

A 2005 CIPA Winner!

For its exceptional application of information technology to solve real-world business problems, Activision/Beenox was recognized with the Judges' Innovation Award at the 2005 Canadian Information Productivity Awards ceremony honouring excellence for innovation.

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