Usefulness of games for training

[Battlefront.com]

No, it's more simple than that. When contract needs go up the procurement chain of command the more that gets tacked onto it. After all, how can you justify spending millions of Dollars to write up specs for something that only costs $400,000 to make? So things that cost relatively little, but are still quite complicated, tend to fall into a region of procurement that doesn't have a lot of support within the existing system.

In theory we could have someone front the money for development and take a huge cut of the resulting government contract. But this is VERY risky. And although two, quite serious, inquiries were made to us for this sort of arrangement (one from a major name that probably everybody here knows), none of them went anywhere because the people that saw the potential weren't the ones writing checks. Obviously they weren't able to convince their internal hierarchies the investment was worth the risk. And that's not surprising.

James Sterrett put it best when he said that they let the instructors decide what works for them and what doesn't. In a perfect world the instructors could agree on a standard design for a particular need and ask that it be produced by someone like us. Instead, instructors pretty much have to purchase things that already exist. And that's a problem because some of the things they want don't exist or, as in the case of CM:SF (which does see some classroom use, BTW), could be vastly better with a modest investment.

It gets back to a much bigger problem within the military. Training is less sexy than new weaponry. Not just for the military itself, but for the entire procurement and industrial side of things. The sad thing is that the waste and fraud in a single major Pentagon contract is probably more than what would satisfy all computer based training needs for several years.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

And to be clear, we could technically afford to take a year or so off from commercial work to make a speculative military training aide. But we don't want to. It's just not smart.

We have always said to prospective military customers that if they don't make us an offer that allows us to do their work IN ADDITION to our commercial work, we're not interested. We have also said that we don't mind keeping features developed for the military out of the hands of our civilian customers, but everything else must remain commercially available.

Wargamers have always been, and will always be, our prime audience. Anything that may interfere with that truism isn't of interest to us. We will not allow anything to change that equation.

Steve