Microsoft's Games Get Serious as they finally open up their Flight Simulator — they call the package ESP:
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.
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Northrop Grumman, for instance, has been beta-testing the ESP platform and its early incarnations for the past several months. It saw significant slashes in budgets and schedules. One team used ESP to create a prototype of an aviation simulation training game—in only three days.“Typically, the same type of simulation would have taken six to 18 months to make from scratch,” says Randy Schmidt, a technical director at Northrop Grumman. “I was surprised.” Schmidt says the Windows-based platform and the easy-to-use interface of the software made it simple to choose from a library of cockpit, terrain, and other design elements—all originally created for the Flight Simulator video game—and combine them with Northrop Grumman’s own visuals and software.
Schmidt adds that to build a complete training aviation simulation—beyond the prototype phase—with realistic 3D graphics from scratch and for a military customer, could still cost well into the tens of millions of dollars. But the cost savings, in terms of purchasing the $799 license for Microsoft ESP that can be used for multiple serious games, is vast, he says. The Windows interface is designed so that in-house designers can create a simulation without writing new code (so no expense of hiring an outside developer). “The entertainment-game graphics are quite realistic,” he says. “Some of the military sims look like poor-man’s versions of video games.”