It’s a Big World After All

Page Two

“Are there some major titles, other than Stargate Worlds and Dark & Light, in development right now using Big World Suite?” I asked.

“Yes,” Spencer nodded. Then he smiled like the Cheshire cat and added, “But none that I can talk about yet.”

Spencer described the Big World Suite as an ever-evolving solution. “When a new developer needs some key feature that we don’t support, we work to integrate that into our package. This is how we’ve formed licensing agreements with companies like SpeedTree.”

Pat Connoy asked Spencer about support for the Technology Suite. Spencer said that it depended largely on the game. “There are some little MMOs, like the ones in China , that can just take the software and run with it and we barely have to do any work with them,” he said. With offices from Colorado to China to Australia , Big World is able to offer global support.

Pat Connoy (left) gets the scoop from Robert Spencer.

Again with the probing questions, Pat Connoy queried, “What’s your biggest challenge in this industry?” Spencer pondered for a long time, and finally responded, “The Chinese games. It isn’t that we have problems with them so much as that it’s a challenge to scale down [Big World] to suit the low-level hybrid technology, built for lower end PCs, that’s used…while continuing to meet the higher end standards for larger games.”

“Who do you see as your competition?” asked Connoy.

“I hate to sound arrogant,” Spencer said, “but I don’t really see that we have any competition. We call our stuff ‘working tech’…our technology works. There are a couple of companies working on doing what we’re doing, but by the time they get there, we’ll be someplace else.”

And how much time can using Big World Technology Suite save on the development process? “We low-ball it,” says Spencer, “We tell them we can save 2 years; but typically it’s even less than that.”