Martine Parry from organizer Apply Events stated: "Serious games are increasingly big business, and the emerging business models are fascinating. The serious games business model presented by Secret Level's re-purposing of America's Army: Rise of a Soldier produced an opportunity for the publisher (Ubisoft) to take a tested game to mass market with an existing player-base; the organization that bankrolled its development (US Military) to develop a revenue stream; and the developer to realize more development work and potential royalties."


She added: "This is a triple-win situation in a market that, with the prohibitive next-gen cost-base, needs to source innovative ways of finding funding for development and mitigating risk. There is no reason why this model cannot work for other organizations that are traditionally outside the game industry, such as Cisco, for example."


Darren Pryke, Manager Rich Media Business Communications, Cisco, works with Nader Nanjiani, a well-known supporter and user of Serious Games who spoke at the Serious Games Summit in DC. He brings an important perspective as an end-user of serious games within a multi-national company, whilst Jeff Tseng provides an expert view of taking a serious game and re-purposing it as a mass market title - focusing on both design and business issues. Both are clearly growing markets for games developers and publishers to target.


Darren agrees with Nader Nanjiani of Cisco, who said: "Cisco-certified audiences have responded favorably to the use of online games as a tool for learning. In fact the results were remarkable. We continue to develop engaging tools for use and adoption by our customers - and learning games is one of them."


To support the discussion, David Amor of Relentless Software stated: "In the past I've written off serious games as being something that wouldn't be able to compete commercially with development for traditional videogames, but that's proved to be an incorrect assumption. In reality there are plenty of opportunities for game developers within serious games, both commercially and creatively."


At ASG 2006, these issues and others will be debated that are relevant to an industry that is beginning to show that it means business - serious business.


Apply Serious Games 2006 (ASG 2006) is a structured professional conference addressing the core practical issues that are important to all the stakeholders in Serious Games; it adresses design, branded learning games, development, tools, and techniques. Funding and business models will also be subject to scrutiny.