Microsoft's Games Get Serious

[Guest PaulR]

At the end of the 2006 movie Snakes on a Plane, a passenger whose only aviation training was playing video games successfully lands a jumbo jet. Come January, thanks to Microsoft (MSFT), such a scenario won't be just a cinematic fantasy. On New Year's Day, 2008, the software giant will release a platform called Microsoft ESP based on Flight Simulator, a 25-year-old video game from Microsoft Game Studios. ESP allows corporations to design customized training simulations. The first target market: aviation companies that cater to the U.S. military and other clients.It's the first time a major software company has entered the "serious"—or nonentertainment—games arena with a product to help other corporations build their own employee-training video games in-house via a simple, Windows-based program. And priced at only $799 per license, Microsoft ESP poses a cost-effective threat to smaller studios that develop custom games—at a cost of $500,000 and up per game—for corporations, hospitals, and the armed forces.

 

For years, companies such as military contractor Northrop Grumman (NOC) had contacted Microsoft, asking if they could license the game engine for Flight Simulator. "Since the late 1990s, there have been ongoing inquiries to our game studio by various companies who ask, 'Can we use this for training? How can we make it do this or that?'" recalls David Boker, senior director of the Business Development Group at Microsoft's Aces Studio, one of Microsoft's game studios, where ESP and Flight Simulator were developed. But at first, Microsoft wasn't interested.

BusinessWeek

 

 

[Guest g_i_jack029]

cool as!!!