Serious game market growth
LONDON, Europe – July 29th, 2008 – The latest copy of Aged eLearning Magazine arrived through The Sauce’s mail box this morning and one article in particular caught our eye.
The headline screamed “Get into the game (everyone else is!)” and was, in our expert opinion, a particularly positive commentary on the movement to virtually-gamey immersive simulation worlds that is taking place in the traditional eLearning and media sectors.
“When I was a lad,” the writer, Gerald Harvey-Smythe observed, “there was a period in 1997 when every training provider suddenly became an e-training provider. The same thing is happening all over again with a plethora of companies shamelessly jumping on the bandwagon.”
This wonderful observation will come us fantastic news to those of us that have been toiling for several years in the seriously virtual psudeo-3D simulations (SVP3DS) space. Finally, we can hear you cry, “people are beginning to get it.”
“These lazy game/simulation wannabies are causing real confusion in the learning & development sector,” Harvey-Smythe stated. He is absolutely right. Fortune 500 companies have never had such a great choice of top-notch expertise to choose from.
Aged eLearning Magazine identified no less than 84 existing companies that have embraced what Harvey-Smythe strangely termed ‘Serious Games.’ A small selection of these are shown in Figure 1 below.
| Company | Brand name | Product/service |
| WEBHEX | Seriously ConferencingTM | serious games-based conferencing tools |
| SAPP | Games-based SCM® | serious games-based supply-chain management |
| Incredibly Blue Machines | FPS Server ManagerTM | first person shooter-based business server administration interfaces |
| MacroShaft | Office Games® | serious games-based word processing and spreadsheets |
| SalesForced | simuCRMTM | immersive learning simulation-based customer relationship management |
| Person Publishing | The Lets have mega fun learning series® | blend of casual, arcade and sims game genres to teach K12 history, geography and math |
| Halfhard University Press | Corporate DeathKill Challenge | MMORPG warfare games-based courses for executive education. |
| ThomThom | Grand Theft Automatic | games-based in-car navigation systems |
| KPWC & Yung LLP | Tax Invaders, Pokataxman & AstroProfits | Serious games-based tax and audit training |
”We have observed numerous eLearning, multimedia, training, education, marketing companies re-brand themselves and/or the product and service brands in a painfully transparent attempt to exploit the hype around serious games,” said the author to highlight that companies from such a diverse range of sectors are being open about their commitment to SVP3DS’s.
“The next worrying development that we predict is the emergence of several dozen competing trade organizations, another hundred or so conferences and an avalanche of CPD courses.”
Great timing perhaps to announce that The Sauce will shortly be releasing more details about the launch of our:
- International Serious Developers Association
- SVP3DS Summit
- GameSIM Annual Gathering
- Meet A Serious Buyer
- Third Monday Cocktail Evenings
- Certified Synthetic Learning Worlds Designer qualification
Potential speakers, exhibitors and sponsors should seriously contact us if they can be bothered.
