amBX — a year in the making

Launching a product that combines peripherals, licensing, an unceasing mission in educating both trade and consumer and a completely new idea in the consumer electronics and gaming space was never going to be easy.

Philips' amBX technology — a system that adds peripheral sensory effects to games, such as lighting, wind from fans and rumble — was ready to launch soon after CES last year. But then amBX went quiet.

Last week, at the 2008 CES in Las Vegas, Philips broke the silence when it confirmed the first publisher to get wholly on board with the concept - Ubisoft will be featuring full amBX support in its anticipated PC shooters Far Cry 2 and Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway.

A coup for the project and the start of great things to come, said amBX chief marketing officer Jo Cooke when we caught up with her at the show.

Jo Cooke: Several things have changed. Some of them are good and some of them are just a reflection of a business that we're not that familiar with as software people, and that's consumer electronics.

What has happened a year on is that the product has only just hit the market. There have been lots of delays, mostly due to the fact that this is an innovative product that incorporates LEDs, which are also a new technology - it just raised a load of production-type issues that we didn't expect.

Having said that, a year ago we weren't ready when it came to content. We had the few basic games and we were trying to work out the best way to bring the product to market and hoping, as with all these chicken and egg things, that one would follow the other.

We discovered a number of things. Firstly, when we started creating content, we have very high visions and goals as to what we want people to do with the content. We want people to start thinking of games development in the context of, "Well, what can we do with amBX and what can be added to it?" And now talking to developers and publishers, we see that they can see that vision, but it's further away than the point at which we expected it all to start. So what we spent the last year doing is thinking about how to satisfy the consumer's need for content when they switch the product on.

One of the things we had started doing at this time last year was to come up with some automated solution which meant they could play their existing games and they would do things [with amBX kit]. We were looking at something call the FX Generator, but it only worked with lights.

Where we are now, a year on, is that we've discovered all sorts of really clever things that we can do, which is that we can use modding interfaces for games. I think I said it a year ago, but I think of it as a spectrum where you start off with the most basic types of effects in the game, which are just light effects that come from the automated scripting solution, to the far extreme where games have been programmed specifically with amBX in mind.

In between, we've found lots of different things that we can do, such as ways to automate fans and rumble effects, where even though they're automated they still work really well. We've just done that with a number of titles. The next step is working out how to input effects that we have a creative input into and that has been possible without the developer's support by creating mods. We only starting doing that around about September time and we've already got five mods out into the market.

We're working with Ubisoft to do it with their back catalogue. The mod we did with Unreal Tournament is fantastic. It started when we did a mod for Quake 4. When we took that mod to Quakecon we realised that the consumers don't care how they get the effects or what's causing it, they just want it to do something. They will become more discerning as time goes on but actually for the time being, as long as everything start working when it gets triggered, it satisfies their need for content.

It's been much steeper learning curve than we thought. It's taught us quite a few things that have been invaluable. I mean, if it hadn't been for this then we probably wouldn't have investigated the potential of our software as thoroughly as we have done. And now we know of things that we're going to do in the future that we would never have even looked at if we hadn't have had to think about how to get around satisfying the consumer.

It's also made us focus more on the consumer. In the reverse of what I've just said, we know the capability of our software and we know that it can do these amazingly brilliant things, but the consumer doesn't need to know that, and right now doesn't care. Right now what we need to do is transfer what we think we're capable of doing into something that's simple for the consumer. We've now got to the point where we're talking about games working with the software and we don't care how that's come about.

No, the opposite to that. The contract process has become much simpler than last year. When I spoke to you last year, the contract process was very arduous. It's not now. We've made our contracts very simple by cutting out a lot of complex stuff. People are starting to come on board with that, and compared to last year, everyone knows what amBX is, whereas a year ago nobody did. I read a review of a Dell PC the other day that was described by the reviewer as having "amBX-esque features". So it's clearly in the minds of the people we're trying to appeal to.

Our challenge now is to get the content on board before we have a critical mass of consumers. But this time last year we weren't thinking as much about what will appeal to the consumer and how to get back to them; we were more interested in the business to business relationships.

[laughs] We've always had to maintain a really strong view on what it is that we're trying to achieve, because we'll never climb those mountains if we didn't think we could do it. And we've always been fairly clear what we thought the challenges were.

Last year, the challenges were whether or not we could get business relationships going. We've always been extremely confident about the consumer reaction, and that's remained so, but now we've started to seriously focus on what we can deliver to the end consumer.

We've even created our own amBX game. We did it as a test, just to test the kits. We put it on our site just before Christmas. It's called Amoebas, and it's a game purely about creating results from the amBX kits.

What we discovered when we started looking at the forums and the reactions from consumers, was that we were so worried about what games would work and that we only had a handful of games, and then people started buying kits and immediately they're listing all the games their kits work with that we didn't even bother to mention. Consumers tell me that Crysis works, and that EVE Online works, and we never tell anybody that...

Well, that's what we've started to do. We've started to list all this stuff on the site. We were so concerned with making sure that it was 100 per cent brilliant content, and actually the end consumer doesn't need that yet. It's just content. And there's so much more content available that works by default than we realised.

No. We've been in discussions with Ubisoft for a very long time, and Ubisoft and Philips do have a some history with other things, with cross promotions of other products. There are a lot of synergies between the two companies, but this hasn't come from that. It's come from the games side, this particular relationship.

It started off with us talking to Ubisoft about the technology, and we wanted to find a way to get all their studios in one place. Also, Ubisoft being a big PC game publisher was really important. What we discovered was that Ubisoft is a very cohesive company and you can go in there and get to where you want to go. You can get to the studios, and you can get to the marketing guys: they have really good organisation in terms of scattering information out to all their areas. So we bought amBX to an all-studio convention they did in Paris, and we got to show it to every studio, and the reaction was very good.

Coupled with that, Brothers in Arms is based in Eindhoven, so there's a nice connection that we'd started talking about [The European arm of Philips is based in Eindhoven, Netherlands]. There probably will be some continued relationships around that coming through that we aren't announcing at this point.

Do you know, it is a relief to be able to announce it. We actually signed the licensing agreement with Ubisoft several months ago but we didn't think that people would want to hear about another business to business relationship, but rather end-products and games.

So we made a conscious decision not to talk about it because it was just another business to business story. So we want to wait to see what kind of things we can do. We've already starting working with the studios, and CES seemed like a good place and time to do it.

Oh yes, there's no exclusivity here. What was really interesting in talking to Ubisoft is that they really focus on the quality of the games, and they really do say, "If we're going to put this in we're going to do it properly." That's why we took so long to come to an agreement about what games it went into, and we haven't announced any other games yet because we want to make sure that we deliver the right effect.

They want their game studios to be thinking about their games' development when they're thinking about amBX, so the idea is that they start thinking about what kind of effects can be incorporated into the game and how they can make amBX work. We'll be working with them on all their press days, their Ubisoft days, we'll be amBX-enabling stuff for them, and it's a very close relationship that we've developed with them.

Oh yes, absolutely, and another of other things that are related to end-product and end-consumer. This year our focus is on the consumer, and as a consequence of that decision we're going to be going to lots and lots of LAN parties.

The critical point for us with that was when we went to Quakecon. They have 16,000 hardcore gamers there, and their response was a real validation of what we're doing. We went to VGExpo after that. When we go to end-consumer events, there's so little cynicism to something new, and they're so excited about it.

It is harder. We think that we've got some solution that we might bring to market. We've got lots of different ways, not to get round, but that we think might work with TVs as well.

Think about how the console solution is entering the living room and the promise of the "box in the corner", particularly from Microsoft. We might be able to come up with a solution that fits them all without being bespoke. There might be some sort of vanilla solution that just works.

We're working at the moment on lots of parallel avenues and in order to decide the best thing to do we need to explore all those different avenues. We could announce that we're doing this version, or that version: what we want is a standard that works with every platform, and a standard that works with every TV. We may come round it a different way.

You have to stick to your goal. You have to stick to your convictions. One thing I think is good is that we've got the same staff we had a year ago. We've got the same core team. People haven't run away. We've got people that are absolutely convinced this is going to work, and every time we come across an obstacle somebody in the organisation comes up with a solution. I really like it. And I'm still absolutely convinced this is going to work and it's going to be a success.