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Massachusetts video game developers are accustomed to cross-country flights. The grail for startup development shops has long been a contract with a West Coast publisher.
Creat Studios Inc. is hoping to change all that. Two new games, set to debut later this year on Sony Corp.’s (NYSE: SNE) PlayStation Network, represent the Canton-based company’s plan to become a leading electronic publisher in the increasingly sophisticated and fast-growing market for digitally distributed games.
Creat gave a sneak peak at the two games last week — a cart-like auto racing game and a wakeboarding game. Neither has an offical title yet, but like other offerings among the latest generation of downloadable games, including the Watchmen title released this month on PlayStation and Microsoft Corp.’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Xbox Live Arcade, these two have the graphics of a retail video game, but about one-tenth the playing time.
Creat, which developed the Tony Hawk Motion game for the Nintendo DS handheld system, last October released three casual games for PlayStation Network — Cuboid, Magic Ball and Mahjong Tales.
Sony’s downloadable offering may be growing, but Microsoft built the business case for digital distribution, said GamerDNA Inc. CEO Jon Radoff, whose Cambridge-based company operates a social information sharing site for gamers. The model has opened the field to small developers, and some aren’t even trying to duplicate high-budget AAA packaged games, he said.
An Xbox game called Braid, for example, provides innovative puzzle-based gameplay and graphics that, while not 3-D, are nonetheless compelling, Radoff said. “It’s more of an impressionistic watercolor experience,” he explained. “I think there’s a lot of room for that kind of innovation.”
A handful of full-length retail titles have been made available for download, but desired download times limit size. In its two new games, Creat uses a technique called normal mapping to render fine details in 3-D play, without exceeding 500 to 700 megabytes per game, said lead artist Peter Calabria.
The result, on the racing game, is objects that splinter or fly apart believably in collisions, and nuanced lighting effects like a bloom of glare at the end of a tunnel. The wakeboarding game seems to have a little less complexity in gameplay, but featured textured, translucent water graphics that broke in realistic waves and splashes.
In December, IDC predicted the gaming industry will more than double revenue in the next four years from connected consoles like the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360. The bulk of the increase — from $2.3 billion in 2008 to $7.6 billion in 2012 — will come from downloads of digitally distributed games, the research firm predicted.
Creat founder and CEO Vladimir Starzhevsky said the digital distribution model gives his company a path to independence from major video game publishers. “Now we are on the front lines” of that possibility, he said, “but we see our company as the NBC of the gaming industry,” developing and distributing content like a television network distributes TV shows, he said.
The company has a team of about 100 developers in Russia, where Creat was originally founded in 1990. Executives and developers run the company and do final testing on games in the company’s Canton headquarters, where about 20 people are employed.
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