Insight
GLI EUROPE INTERVIEW Dennis Byram
“We offer a quality check before clients give their actual submission, which really benefits them as it makes their time to market much faster. We conduct the quality check before the actual submission so they can work out all the kinks beforehand. The result is that it’s a lot cheaper for the client to use us as their quality control as opposed to hiring a dedicated team themselves. Our clients are able to take advantage of a huge resource pool and don’t have to spend all that money internally.”
allows us to ask them to review individual products,” explains Dennis. “Te regulators are really good about taking a look and deciding whether products are correctly configured - or not. Regulators are, after all, the best placed to see if a product really fits into their market, if it adheres to their laws and technical standards.”
In an ideal world, the development process for a game would begin life fully understanding all the requirements necessary for each market and would be adapted appropriately from the start. Te reality, completely understandably, is somewhat different. Te creative process concentrates the mind on the delivery of a fabulous player experience, before the shoe-horning begins as the code is made fit for market. Speaking to Dennis, he’d love to get his hands on the product as early in the development cycle as possible, as he believes that early contact means better outcomes. Helping developers with market specific guidelines means that GLI is able to provide a framework within which suppliers can create their software, safe in the knowledge that they’re already fulfilling the criteria for their intended markets.
“We offer a quality check before clients give their actual submission, which really benefits them as it makes their time to market much faster,” says Dennis. “We conduct the quality check before the actual submission so they can work out all the kinks beforehand. Te result is that it’s a lot cheaper for the client to use us as their quality control as opposed to hiring a dedicated team themselves. Our clients are able to take advantage of a huge resource pool and don’t have to spend all that money internally.”
At G3 we’ve travelled the world visiting the offices of hundreds of game developers; whereby the office tour
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always goes the same way… we meet the game dev team, who are enthusiastic, eclectically dressed, have huge Lego Star Wars models perched on their desks and avoid eye-contact; we are shown the finance department, which is all polite smiles, waves and shuffling towards the door; we meet the marketing team who are remarkably less stressed than at the last trade show; and then we get to meet the compliance team, who again are wonderfully friendly, but who the game devs describes as: “the guys that say no to everything.”
Dennis laughs at our description. “No one likes to say no, so, instead of just saying no, you say, ‘as the product currently sits, we can’t make it fit into the market - but here’s how you can move forward.’ And now we’ve lots of things that we can discuss and a lot of things we can’t. We can’t discuss patents or client submissions, so we have to keep things at a very high level and supply information that’s published or in the technical standards. If you have to say no, then you give a reason and supply the guidelines that are available for that market. In extreme cases you have to be honest with the client and explain that it’s not working. It’s tough, but it’s also the right thing to do.”
On the day G3 visited GLI’s offices in Hillegom, Dennis had received an email from a satisfied customer that he read to us, withholding the client’s name. “Hi guys, I’m grateful for the information from GLI compliance. GLI compliance blows everybody else in the industry out of the water.” Te email was from an online gaming client and you could see just how much it meant to Dennis. “Tat’s the feedback you want, that’s what you strive for, what the core values represent,” enthuses Dennis. “Tose are the comments that make you want to work harder for your clients and go that extra mile.”
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