Market Research (9/15/2020)
This week, I did research on Market sectors and Relevant companies which my research may fall in. This information can be useful for identifying potential audiences and stakeholders that would be interested in my work.
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Relevant Market Sectors
For this research project, I am investigating how tools powered by procedural generation can be used to automate level design. Given this, it seems that the following markets may be relevant:
- Video Game Industry
- AI (artificiant intelligence is usually necessary for procedural generation)
Relevant Companies
Within the above sections, here are some of the biggest players:
Sucker Punch Productions
Sucker Punch is a first-party game developer owned by Playstation. Based in Bellevue, WA, the company has had hughe success with its recent Ghost of Tushima game for the platstation 4. Their current reported revenue is 31 million dollars (zoominfo)
Ubisoft
Ubisoft is a games company based in Montreuil, France. They own several development studios across the world which develop AAA games; most notably, Ubisoft Montreal (Far Cry: New Dawn) and Ubisoft Paris (Ghost Recon: Wildlands). They also publish games as well, and work with 3rd part developers to help distribute their games. As of 2018, the companies revenue was 1.732 billion EUR.
Nintendo
Nintendo is a game development, publisher, and console manufacturer based in Kyoto, Japan. Its Nintendo Switch console has recently broken a record: it recorded the highest August dollar sales for a hardware platform in US history this past August (Video Games Chronicle) Its revenue as of 2020 is 1.309 trillion JPY (Google).
Microsft
Microsoft is a multinational technology company based in Redmond, Washington that specializes in computer software, personal computers (powered by Windows OS), and consumer electronics. Its Xbox division is a big player in the game industry, with various first-party and third-party partners. It also maintains various AI solutions, such as Cortana and the Azure AI platform. Its revenue as 2020 is 143 billion USD.
Relevant Products
I also took a look into some procedural generation products that exist within the Game Industry market in particular. Some tools are made with AAA studios and large scale level design in mind. Others are free tools which smaller development teams can take advantage of:
Ghost of Tsushima
An engineer at Sucker Punch Games who worked on Ghost of Tsushima was interviewed by WolverineSoft over the summer. One of his responsibilities included working on procedural generation tools to help automate the creation of the open world. It makes sense that these sorts of tools would be necessary; the world of Ghost of Tsushima is so large that it would take a significant amount of time to build by hand.
World Creator
World Creator is a Terrain and Landscape generator that can be used to automatically create natural environments in real time.
3D scene Procedural Engine
A general purpose tool that can be used to procedurally generate a wide variety of designs (roads, buildings, furniture assets). It uses a Node-based language that is visual; unlike text-based scripting, control and logic can be built using node structures and graphs. This allows for a designer to more intuitively develop procedural assets without being bogged down by semantics of languages like C++ or C#.
World Maker
World Maker Is a 2D tool that can be used to automatically generate 2D maps. Once the user specifies some options (map size, number of continents), the tool will quickly build a map populated with islands, randomized climate, country identifiers (flags), etc. The tool also permits users to modify the map's contents once it has been generated.