AGDC: Emergent Announces Emergent Platform Beta, HP Partnership

Emergent Game Technologies has announced its new Emergent Platform, a comprehensive online game platform, also announcing a deal with HP's Flexible Computing Services to enable game companies to use a scalable infrastructure on a "pay-as-you-go" basis. The Emergent Platform is a development and deployment platform for creating and launching online games, and the companies will make it available under a Software-as-a-Service (Saas) business model. In addition to the integration of HP services, the initial beta offering of the Emergent Platform will include Emergent’s Metrics Element for Online Games, The Emergent Dashboard for analytics and reporting, AppLogic Grid computing layer from 3Tera, and an E-commerce and consumer billing package from Aria Systems. Emergent will be rapidly adding more services and increase the capabilities of this initial offering to best serve the industry as more and more games migrate online. The company says the integration of HP Flexible Computing Services will support the Platform with standards-based technologies including BladeSystem c-Class server blades and StorageWorks solutions, which reside in HP datacenters. The Platform allows developers and publishers to pay as their games scale instead of making a significant financial investment before a game is ready for consumer availability. Emergent says it aims to enable developers to deploy online games more quickly and at lower cost, adding that the SaaS model is intended to reduce risk and increase return on investment. The beta version of the Emergent Platform’s online game deployment service will be available in September 2007 and according to Emergent, is the first step in a multi-lateral initiative from Emergent and HP to meet the technical and business needs of the interactive entertainment development community. HP is also focused on streamlining game development, launch and management with its ongoing HP Game On initiative. “Up until now, developers and publishers have had to sink huge sums of money into their infrastructure technologies before the game could earn a single dollar,” explained Emergent CEO Geoffrey Selzer. “With our Software-as-a-Service business model, now they can tie their financial investments to the ‘stand-up,’ deployment and growth of a game, and manage their cash flow over the actual cycle of a game.”