BUILD | TOOLS NEWS The future of Autodesk
GDC 2012 will see some big news from tools giant Autodesk. With the show upon us, Will Freeman asks the company’s vice president of product management Marc Stevens, what we can expect, and how Autodesk sees the industry’s future
Autodesk’s Digital Entertainment Creation tools, such as 3ds Max (right) are beginning to cater for a wider variety of studio models, says Marc Stevens (above)
IT’S BEEN AROUND a year since you revealed the Project Skyline pipeline concept and debuted the 2012 iteration of the digital entertainment product line – a relatively long time in the games industry. How has Autodesk’s perspective on the industry evolved over that time? One thing we’re really trying to do with games is better understand and communicate our vision for what Digital Entertainment Creation – or DEC – means for games. Back then Project Skyline was a technology
where we started to talk about a games market today where – not unlike film – things have been getting more complex and people are wanting to do more on the same budget. They want more interesting gameplay – and despite the rise of social gameplay they still want ever better graphics, whether that’s on a console or some sort of MMO game. Me personally, I think what you’re going to see happen is that in the rise of these successful social gaming platforms where the differentiator is the social aspect of the game, as more show up and where there’s more competition, people are going to want to stand out. That will be through, again, gameplay and graphics; the things that make console games successful. Before that change, we used to see three tiers in the industry; the triple-A developer at the high-end, and then the mid-tier
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developer that was seen as doing ‘double-A’ games, and then the casual and lower-spec games. We’re seeing the middle segment going away now, and publishers are spending a lot more on investing in key franchises. There’s less taking of chances, but there is
more investment in that casual space down at the lower end. The middle tier are either climbing up to those triple-A games, or they are splitting into smaller newly made studios targeting the casual and mobile market.
People are going to want to stand out in
social, and that will be through, again, gameplay and graphics.
Marc Stevens, Autodesk
So how is that reflected by what Autodesk offers developers? What’s good about that change is that now, at the top, there is even more complexity and even larger teams, and that’s where our tools can help. And with a lot of those middle-tier developers going both ways; they already knew our tools, and they are starting to take
that knowledge and our tools down into those segments. What we’re looking at when we’re talking about what DEC means for games is not dissimilar from the Skyline message. We’re allowing a workflow where people can work more smoothly from their art creation all the way out to where they are putting out content on their runtime device. It’s about creating an iterative workflow. With DEC we’ve been asking ourselves how can we help games developers with this workflow where they can continually create their art, see how it runs in game, and then change their art accordingly, without it being a super-heavy, complex process.
And you’re talking about a process suitable for each tier of that spectrum? I couldn’t say Autodesk really invented this. The larger games developers have been doing this on their own. They don’t have a choice but to solve these problems. Everyone in that space is trying to solve these problems in a similar way, and then down market there are developers who don’t have the luxury of large teams to do this for them. That means that there’s a way Autodesk can help everybody. I feel ‘democratised’ is a bit of an overused term, but we can help standardise these workflows and help bring them to a wider group of people.
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