Dear Industry Friends,
These are ‘interesting’ times for everyone, both inside and outside of our industry and certainly for Abstraction on many levels. On one hand, like everyone else, we’re dealing with COVID-19 and are all working from home. Boy, how I miss the office and particularly on Friday late afternoons, when we’d usually hang out, watching colleagues present their latest work, while drinking beers served from our own tap. On the other hand, I’ve been extremely proud lately.
I’ll tell you why that is…
First, ever since we went in full working-from-home mode in April overnight, our productivity literally went up. This speaks volumes of the tenacity of our employees making the best out of a bad situation. Sometimes we all struggle due to being isolated, but I think everyone’s really going above and beyond to urge one another to seek company, if only virtual through digital communication means. You see this happening everywhere in the world and it’s an incredibly heart-warming and powerful experience.
Second, over the years we’ve been moving from executing ports and adaptations of smaller indie games towards AAA firefighting as tech consultants and co-development on well-established IP. Think about this for a moment… People at big companies owning massively successful and valuable franchises trust us enough to work with them on their precious property and there is simply no bigger compliment than getting someone’s trust.
Take for instance BioWare’s recent public announcement relating to“Mass Effect - Legendary Edition”, where we have had, and still have, a tech strike team working on fundamental parts of their technology. I was only dreaming about this kind of opportunity as recent as 3 months ago.
And yet, we should not dwell on this too long. Success, as well as happiness, are momentary by design and neither should be taken for granted. Indeed, we never stop thinking “Beyond Boundaries”. It is our number one core value and is deeply ingrained in everything we do, from executive meetings to informal catchups and from brainstorming sessions to 360-degree employee appraisals. I look forward to sharing our 3 other core values next year, but I will save you for now from yet another over-enthusiastic rant that I’m known for ;)
While we’re constantly improving our Service Business, we are also putting an increasing amount of energy into the reason why we started Abstraction in the first place: new technology and game prototype development. The last 13 years have been an amazing opportunity to learn from the best in the industry and then to feed the knowledge and experience gained into our own creative work. We’re so much wiser now than when we started, thanks to the wonderful partnerships we’ve been able to build and maintain. I couldn’t be happier!
Stay tuned for future news about our internal development, as while it’s a bit too early at this point, our ambitions are incredibly high and the internal products we’re working on are being designed to push the envelope and disrupt – going “beyond boundaries”
Ralph Egas
CEO of Abstraction