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Licensed Software - Cost Benefit Analysis

This article explores the selection criteria, impact, and case study of licensing software for game development, analyzing the cost and benefits. Learn from industry expert Bill Dalton about the importance of choosing wisely to maximize productivity and deliver high-quality games.

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Licensed Software - Cost Benefit Analysis

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  1. Licensed Software - Cost Benefit AnalysisBill Dalton – Tech Director Bioware Austin • So how’s that licensed software working for you? • If you take nothing else away from this talk, remember the red parts.

  2. Contents • Part I – Selection Criteria • Part II – Impact • Part III – Case Study – BioWare MMO

  3. Selection Criteria: Why license? • Time to build = money • Time to build = opportunity cost • Lacking Expertise?

  4. Selection Criteria: time = money? • Consider • Are you licensing your “best trick?” • How complex is the product • Most importantly, is it integral to your work flow? • These considerations should not disqualify licensing, but…

  5. Selection Criteria: time = money? • Assuming that you have taken the above into account, analysis of build/buy is straight forward. • We have technical requirements…

  6. Selection Criteria: choose wisely • By this point you have committed to licensing something. The spreadsheets help you determine which something to buy. But they offer a strictly a technical analysis. • There are also some less obvious considerations: • Include stakeholders’ usage requirements. • Licensing/legal requirements – be careful with this. • Service agreements – recurring costs, source code integration. • All of this is probably less important than the choice to build/buy in the first place.

  7. Selection Criteria: opportunity costs • Opportunity cost is the value of a product forgone to produce or obtain another product. - McConnell, Campbell (2005). Microeconomics: Principles, Problems, and Policies. McGraw-Hill Professional, 27. • Time to build = time you could have spent making a great game or improving a working tool

  8. Selection Criteria: opportunity costs • Also, Time to build = time your customers (content providers) are not iterating on ideas and not building a great game. • They are waiting, and doing something else (that you hope is productive.) • This is usually the real reason to license.

  9. Impact • Philosophy • It is easy to point to what is broken day by day. • It is somehow harder to recognize what is going well today.

  10. Impact continued • How often do people come to your office to tell you how great those tools you built are?

  11. Impact continued • How often do they come asking for a new feature?

  12. Impact continued Licensing will not change the ratio of these occurrences

  13. Impact continued • Thesis: • The features requested under a licensing scenario will be much higher value • to your team’s productivity, and/or • to the final quality of the product

  14. Impact continued • In other words, for a given timeline, licensed software can help you: • deliver a game ahead of schedule, or • deliver a higher quality game on schedule. (Most people choose this one.) • Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham • Key take away – Always use the highest level language you can get away with to solve a problem. Licensing software is an analog for game development.

  15. Case study:BWA MMO • Here is a partial list of the technology that we have licensed. For each one I want to lay out • 1) What we would have done without it. • 2) How much leverage we gained by using it. • 3) What, if any, advanced features/capabilities do we have as a consequence of licensing that tech.

  16. Case study:BWA MMOcontinued • dPVS (Umbra Software) • Without dPVS • Write our own visibility system. • Leverage • Very efficient, gives us headroom for other things. • Advanced features enabled • Nothing specific. • Conclusion • No brainer. Very narrow focus. Just plug it in. It works.

  17. Case study:BWA MMOcontinued • Morpheme (Natural Motion) • Without Morpheme • Write our own animation system and authoring/editing tools. • Leverage • Source code license allows us to modify an already robust system. • Advanced features enabled • Some nice game-specific integration here. • Conclusion • Good for us, but lots of labor involved in our modifications. Animation is a big deal to us and we are halfway between custom/license with Morpheme.

  18. Case study:BWA MMOcontinued • GFx (Scaleform) • Without GFx • Write our own UI system and authoring tools. • Leverage • Huge – anyone who can work in flash can develop our UI. • Advanced features enabled • Allows a lot of UI possibilities. • Conclusion • No brainer. Well isolated from game. Using Flash engine is a major win.

  19. Case study:BWA MMOcontinued • Kynapse (Autodesk) • Without GFx • Write our own AI pathing system and authoring tools. • Leverage • Sophisticated tools to analyze terrain/levels. • Frees up content developers that would have been placing nodes etc. • Advanced features enabled • Full AI solution – comes with a lot of interesting canned functionality that I doubt we would have developed on our own. • Conclusion • No brainer. Easiest possible workflow once integrated. • Extremely nice performance characteristics for MMO.

  20. Case study:BWA MMOcontinued • Oracle (Oracle ) • Without Oracle • Write our own persistence mechanism (lots of games have). • Open source? • Leverage • Sophisticated analysis tools. • Can hire Oracle experts. • Pre-existing array of Oracle-ready libraries. • Advanced features enabled • Vast array of reporting capabilities. • Data warehousing etc. • Conclusion • Expensive, but worth the money for us.

  21. Case study:BWA MMOcontinued • Omega (Castlehill(defunct)) • Without Omega • Use HeroEngine process management and messaging protocols. • Leverage • Robust server control and reporting capabilities. • Code generation capabilities • Advanced features enabled • More extensible server architecture. • Conclusion • Special purpose – good for us.

  22. Case study:BWA MMOcontinued • HeroEngine (Simutronics ) • Without HeroEngine • Write our own engine from scratch (probably not). • Build our own engine from more granular pieces. • Leverage • Content development from day one. • Advanced features enabled • Extremely sophisticated content tools. • Live editing – iterative power. • Conclusion • Excellent paradigm for game programmers to work directly with content developers. Excellent productivity. • Byzantine code base – difficult to adapt in place. • Hard to measure performance.

  23. Recap • Real reasons to license: • Time to build = time your customers (content providers) not iterating on ideas and not building a great game. • The features requested under a licensing scenario will be much higher value • to your team’s productivity, and/or • to the final quality of the product

  24. Discussion • Some possible talking points • Consider life cycle of product • Early adopter +/- • Platform support? • Vendor goes out of business? • Licensing may not save you any time at all! • Sometimes integrating someone else’s tech is as hard as building your own.

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