Illustration by Anna Keith
With a recession darkening far too many prospects at the moment, most businesses likely consider expansion a virtual impossibility. Luckily for David Whatley, though, he specializes in virtuality at Simutronics Corp.
"I think we're on a run rate to $7 million this year," Whatley says, using a bit of investment jargon that refers to a company's projected annual revenues. From his St. Charles office, he adds, "We're growing fast at this point, and I'm hoping to double year over year for a little while here."
Whatley founded Simutronics in 1987 and for a time oversaw it from his bedroom in his parents' house. Beyond remaining the company's president and CEO, he also serves as chief designer of its main products: MMORPGs. That ungainly acronym means "massively multiplayer online role-playing games" and refers to products involving thousands and sometimes millions of monthly subscribers who create and guide digital alter egos through a 24/7 world hosted on a company's server or servers.
Leading the field are such games as World of Warcraft, EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies. Cyber-solitaire they're not. In fact, citing findings of the research and consulting firm DFC Intelligence, a 2006 Business Wire release called MMORPGs "the fastest-growing segment of the video games market, with $2 billion in global revenues and growing at a projected $1 billion per year."
Almost a decade ago, Inc. magazine dubbed Simutronics' offerings "pure linguistic mind candy, at first baffling, then kind of distracting and ultimately downright adhesive." To a nongamer, they certainly may seem … immersional. Suggestively, just the intro to Modus Operandi, a game of modern intrigue and romance set in the Caribbean, approaches 7,000 words—more than four times the length of this feature. Of the intensive nature of the average MMORPG, even Whatley notes with a chuckle, "If you get sucked into it, you have no time for anything else."
As a result, MMORPG business is booming, and in an increasingly global economy, it gives every indication of continuing to do so. Just last year, indeed, futurologist and author Charles Stross speculated, "By 2023 I wouldn't be too surprised if 750 million people have tried [MMORPGs]—that's 10 percent of the world population."
Of course, not even Simutronics' most popular games—the medieval fantasies GemStone IV and DragonRealms—soar anywhere near such heights, but Whatley soon hopes to boost the company's subscriber totals substantially: "We have another title in the works called Hero's Journey, built on the HeroEngine platform, which has been our plan to achieve a much larger penetration than the tens of thousands we have now."
The term "platform" here means not a dedicated console like Microsoft's Xbox, Nintendo's Wii or Sony's PlayStation, but a software library functioning in the background to create a game's foreground—and ironically, the platform in question delayed the game it was designed to launch. "We started showing Hero's Journey to people," Whatley recalls, "and they got excited about the technology behind it and wanted it for themselves. And we had no intentions of ever getting into what's called the 'middleware' business, where you provide technology to other people. But then, after enough arm-twisting—our arm being twisted, I mean—we had no choice anymore."
Hindsight makes it all too understandable why Simutronics attracted otherwise-unsought middleware clients like BioWare, the Austin/Edmonton-based game company acquired earlier this year by industry giant Electronic Arts. HeroEngine supposedly can shave a year or two from the development of a given game—and according to a 2003 white paper from the International Game Developers Association, such development can take three to four years and cost more than $30 million. That industry report suggests another reason why Simutronics diversified: "[A]s the market becomes increasingly crowded, licenses, marketing support, outstanding game experiences and a strong customer-focused launch become increasingly important."
As a result, however, Hero's Journey lingers "in production." According to its prospectus at play.net (Simutronics' website), Hero's Journey will further explore DragonRealms' mythical world of Elanthia, in the subgenre known as heroic fantasy or swords-and-sorcery—think J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, creator of the presciently named Gray Mouser. The game's tentative cast of character-types numbers nine: warrior, ranger, rogue, wizard, necromancer, "gearknight," healer, cleric and bard. (A necromancer, by the way, makes magic involving the dead; what a gearknight does, heaven or Harley-Davidson alone knows.) Audaciously, the online prospectus promises, "Players will be able to customize their characters with a system that is unmatched compared to other [MMORPGs]."
Time alone will tell when Hero's Journey goes live and joins DragonRealms, GemStone IV, Modus Operandi and Simutronics' two other games, Alliance of Heroes and CyberStrike 2, each of whose base subscriptions Whatley estimates at $15 monthly. "Then there are 'upsells' from there," he continues. "There are what we call ticketed events, which are things like festivals, quests and these weddings that go on in the products as well."
Extras like that cost, naturally, and Simutronics' combination of fantasy and finance has allowed Whatley himself to adopt a fairly fantastic lifestyle, jetting here and there to attend game-related conferences and other company functions. "I live in St. Louis 10 percent of my time, and the rest of it, I'm flying all over the world," he says. "And I'm not just talking about the country—I mean the whole world: I've been in Moscow, I've been in Kiev, I've been all over the place."
Such globe-trotting has undoubtedly given him a perspective on the industry that might escape someone unfamiliar with its often surprising nuances. "These games have virtual economies, and virtual economies have an unofficial but very real exchange rate with the real world," he observes of MMORPGs in general. "In fact, the virtual economies of these games eclipse that of many countries. And it's a whole untapped Wild West that the entire planet's gonna have to wrestle with."
At times, Whatley himself sounds boggled by it all: "You can't run a world on an economy like that, where Simutronics, for instance, has control over the financial destiny of real people—yet it does."
Nonetheless, he expresses cautious optimism about broadening Simutronics' audience, especially into the burgeoning and varied Asian markets. "Hero's Journey is definitely designed to appeal to that crowd," says Whatley. "Now, whenever you go after a region like that, you have to think in terms of culturalizing your game design, which is a black art that nobody's really mastered. The type of game-play that a North American enjoys and the type that someone in China enjoys are very different. And so it's hard to make a 'one size fits all.' So we really focus on having the game-play have a lot of points of adaptability in it."
In the spirit of adaptability, Simutronics' operations are themselves slowly going global. "We're trying to push for these highly distributed, collaborative environments that are really geographically agnostic," Whatley remarks before alluding to teams in China and elsewhere. Still, the majority of the company's programmers, designers, "GameMasters" (off-site part-timers, often volunteers, who help run games) and other personnel remain predominantly domestic. "Then those people kind of follow the population density of the United States," he says. "You know—West Coast, East Coast, Florida. It follows not just the population but kind of the tech-savviness of the country."
Fortunately for the metro area, St. Charles still hosts one of the company's two main sites—and unlike the administration-based second site in Gaithersburg, Md., it focuses on Simutronics' game development and digital operations. "We have a data center here, and we have maybe 30 or 40 boxes [servers] in there doing different things," says Whatley. "The game servers themselves—entire products run on a single server box. Now, when we talk about titles like Hero's Journey in the future, that will probably exist in colocation facilities on much bigger server clusters."
Only roughly 20 programmers staff the St. Charles center, for a logical enough reason, according to Whatley: "Our technology, even for the existing titles that we have, allows for people to work on them remotely, and so we have a large number of independent contractors who also contribute to it. The total number of those is actually 300, give or take."
Between HeroEngine and Hero's Journey, the company's operational expansion led it to announce a physical expansion of its St. Charles location earlier this year from 1500 Wall Street into a new 26,000-square-foot space in the 370 Corporate Center Office Park. That hasn't gone well, alas. "Hopelessly behind schedule, thanks to the rain," Whatley confesses with a chuckle. "We need the new facility because right now we are crammed—we have 50-odd people in this one building, and we're moving to a building where we can get like 180."
Amusingly (or annoyingly) enough, Whatley regards recruiting in the metro area as a major bane: "I can't hire enough people locally to fill the positions. I mean, we talk about an economy that's down? I'm hiring." He stresses the last sentence, then laughingly addresses potential applicants: "Come on over—but bring skill!"
Ah, yes, skill—there's the rub. Whatley continues: "The sad truth is that St. Louis does not generate the kind of talent that's needed, the universities and whatnot—they do not have a clue how to churn out the kind of people I need to hire. So I import almost 100 percent of my talent, which I think is ridiculous."
In discussing Simutronics and its place in the St. Louis corporate landscape, Whatley sometimes sounds like a proselytizer for the newest "new economy" or, at a minimum, whatever pop economic theory's readying to tread on Chris Anderson's Long Tail—an Even Longer Tail, perhaps: "We cannot rely on the Monsantos and the Boeings because those businesses are very cyclic, right? And when those things go down, you get this massive economic depression in an area, and it starts to feed on itself. Those can't be the backbone of your local economy; it actually has to be the small businesses."
Only in a Disney delirium, sad to say, have dinosaurs ever heeded the counsel of proto-mammals. In that light—with a laugh made unintentionally ironic, even macabre, by recent events surrounding Anheuser-Busch—Whatley eventually adds, "You can always sell a lot of beer, I guess."
