So I’ve been pretty busy for the last month. I left my job at Turbine at the end of February, and I took a break for the month of March to attend GDC and… well, to set up my new company.
Wait, a New Company?
I’ve started a company called Orbus Gameworks, right here in Boston. We’re focusing on middleware development and consulting. In particular, we’re focused on gameplay metrics, which is what I specialized in at my previous job.
We’re a company of three people, and I am incredibly lucky that my two employees are Craig Perko and Jeff Ward. I’ve known them both for about five years, and they are both incredibly awesome developers who are waaay better at programming than I am. So, Jeff and Craig are handling the programming. I’m handling everything else (accounting, sales, marketing, operations, general buffoonery).
Gameplay Metrics?
So you might be wondering: what the hell is gameplay metrics? The answer is pretty simple. In the broadest sense I’m talking about measuring what players do in your game. Let’s say you’re a developer working on a first person shooter and you’re in beta. Collecting stats on what your beta players are doing is of utmost importance. You want to ask questions like:
- How often is the shark gun equipped?
- What is the average length of time to complete the casino level?
- How often is each optional objective achieved?
- Where and when do players die, and what kills them?
- Do players use a variety of weapons, or do they tend to stick with one or two?
- Is there any content in our game that is simply never used?
And those are just the tip of the iceberg. And of course, that’s just for a generic FPS. This kind of data collection has a lot of utility for any kind of game (for example, MMORPGs like the ones I used to work on, or casual titles which can benefit immensely from this sort of feedback).
We’re here to help developers collect and analyze these metrics. We are working on what I think is going to be a pretty awesome set of tools that can be easily integrated into any game so you can end up with a database populated with all sorts of useful data on what your players are up to.
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Congratulations on your new venture!
These gameplay metrics look VERY exciting…I hope you get to post here about curiosities your customers discover about the usage of their games…that would be extremely interesting.
Good luck!
I think non-massively multiplayer games with social meta-game (where the two are modulated, rather than persistently conjoined) can benifit a lot from this, of course, thats where I’m coming from idn’t it?
That sounds great. I wish you the best of luck!
How come I’m always the last one to hear about these things?
Are you aiming at metrics collected server-side for MMOs (like Emergent’s metric stuff) or for client-reported metrics on a wider variety of games? We have our own metric collection systems, but I’m always on the lookout for a nice bit of middleware to give us less code to maintain. :)
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