Generating game content can be time-consuming and expensive _– and for good reason. It's highly-skilled work, and making games which appeal to particular cultural demographics is very difficult indeed. But Meta Games Universal claim to have the solution which will speed up time-to-market for slot manufacturers and save a lot of money, too. Cargo is the name of their solution, as Owen Cullum explains…

Casino International: Tell us about the company and why it evolved…
Owen Cullum: Meta Games is a small company, started a year ago by developers who are experienced in casino and video lottery terminal [VLT] development. Myself and my cofounder have many years experience of developing software and software systems. We were both employed by Cyberview who were pretty much founders in the area of server-based gaming systems. I was responsible for developing the US variant of the platform and getting it approved in the US. It was the first class III server-based system approved in the US. Part of the Cyberview experience, for us, was that we learned an awful lot about gaming development technology and also about the ways the market place worked; particularly the regulators and the regulatory environment.
The reason Meta Games came about – and Cargo – was that the real bottleneck when introducing a new gaming system happens at the content production stage. Anywhere where you have slot machines it's the content that makes people play the games, if you don't have the content no-one will play. Players need to have the reward, both in terms of entertainment and financial gain. What this new server-based or networked system is going to do is to produce new types of content or the same content in different ways to fine tune it to the market place. Content was already the bottleneck even without being server-based and the need to move quickly against the competition and to move to keep up with regulations is already a problem but this new technology is going to speed that up.

CI: So how does Cargo work? What does it do?
OC: Cargo will enable people developing games to develop them faster and cheaper – so in its basic form it's a productivity aid. However, we like to call it an 'enabling technology' for games development. Not only is it going to bring about the needed improvements in development efficiency, in terms of cost and time, but it enables the development to take place in a different way and allows much more flexibility. So now it's just much easier for a large manufacturer to say to their customers, if you want to have a customized version of that game, that will not be a problem. For example if they wanted to go into a new foreign market with a game that prospect is going to be much easier.
What Cargo does is brings about a number of technical and business benefits: From a technical point of view it allows there to be a much greater separation between the game designers and the developers. Presently when you want to produce a game, the game designers and the software developers have to work very closely together. Bottlenecks occur as there are typically only a few software developers who know the platform and know how to produce a particular effect, how to code it. So you have a bunch of guys who design the graphics, the aesthetics and the mathematics. They will decide what features they want and they need to get the software developers to implement it. People who know both are very rare. So producing a game can take much longer than you think because of communication issues, etc.
What Cargo doesn't do is to make software developers redundant, as they are free to develop new technology. Cargo can be used to add new features that have been introduced by the software developers and to make unique versions of the same game types for different customers. 90 per cent of the games that are produced are very similar to what went before with tweaks, bells and whistles. Cargo allows game designers to produce those without going to the software developers. Also once a software developer has produced a new type of game, say for example to mirror a new game on the Wii, that game type can be plugged into Cargo for use as a new variant by Cargo game designers.
Cargo is not just a game generator, it is a system for producing game generators. For each platform we need to implement an interface into that platform then a Cargo-based generator will be produced. So in other words at the end of that process, which is quite short, that manufacturer will have their own generation system for their platform. The important point about that, is this system is extendable so it can support multiple platforms because we separate design specification from implementation. So a manufacturer can have a Cargo-based generator that can support multiple platforms. Therefore when they get to the build part of the game generation process they can build for as many platforms as they require, so there is a much greater crossover phase. Also if in the future they want to support a new platform with that game they can easily add it without dropping the old content.


CI: What do you need to do to get a manufacturer up and running with Cargo?
OC: It's quite simple, if they have a GDK, which is a kit that they give out to game houses. We, or they, take that kit and interface it to Cargo. That process can take from a couple of weeks to a couple of months.

CI: What's the feedback been so far from the industry?
OC: Very good. We are working on a couple of platforms right now. One of the things is to get people to see the benefits; some people say to us that “sounds too good to be true” but after seeing a live demo, a short demo is also on the website [www.metagu.com], people can see that you can work in this different way very effectively.

CI: If your process is GLI accredited, could that potentially mean that all games generated through it are automatically accredited in some jurisdictions?
OC: No. Every game, irrespective of how it is produced, is to be approved by the regulators for certification. It may be possible somewhere in the future where everyone is more aware of the development technology and the tools for each game not to have to be individually approved as they are adapted from similar content, though I can't see that happening in the short term.

CI: Sum up your approach for our readers…
OC: Our approach with Cargo and Meta Games in general is providing content and tools for producing content for the industry. It enables manufacturers and developers to improve their content pipeline. All manufacturers have to have a content pipeline, you can't just produce a game and sit back, you have to go on to the next; we want to enable their content pipeline.

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