LO1 - Sumo Digital business report

Sumo Digital

The company's official website

Company structure

Sumo was founded in 2003, the company has 3 co-founders. At the top is Carl Caver who is also the company’s CEO, their second co-founder and COO is Paul Porter who discovered the game business in 1998 when he wrote Predator 2 for the Comador-64, the other co-founder is Darren Mills who is also Sumo’s art director and later became the director of Sumo India. Darren Mills was previously the lead artist for Gremlin Interactive in1995 before becoming the Studio Art Director at Infogrames Sheffield House.

Below the co-founders is Ash Bennett, technical director. His career also began at Gremlin Graphics in 1989 where he was writing various games for the C64, though he later progressed on to writing games for the NES, PC engine, SNES and becoming a lead programmer for ‘Loaded’ on PS1 before finally leaving in 1996. Next to Ash Bennett is their Creative Director, Sean Millard who has been designing video games since 1993, he also worked for Gremlin/Infogrames in 1999 and became Sumo’s Creative Director in 2011. Their development directors include Gary Edwards who began programming for Gremlin in 1996, their second Development Director is Steven Zalud who has been working in the games industry since 1995 and their third Development Director is Gary Moore who has worked with companies such as Eidos and Psygnosis since 1997.Below all their directors are their general staff which includes around 260 people.

Platform Technology

Sumo have covered a wide range of platforms including but not exclusive to Xbox, PlayStation portable, Windows, Nintendo DS, and Mac OS. More recently they have been mainly involved with the flagship consoles of Xbox and PlayStation but they have also developed some iOS and Android based games including ‘Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed’.  Covering such a wide range of platforms is beneficial to a company because everyone has a preferred platform and therefore they are able to reach a wider audience which of course increases the company’s profit.

Game Types

As stated on the home page of Sumo’s website, they create “everything from driving games to platformers,” which is clear when looking at their Gaming Archive. In the company’s early years they developed various racing games (namely Sega’s OutRun for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox), they also were the main developer for the majority of the ‘Virtua Tennis’ series. Over the years they have developed various puzzle and point-and click adventures as well as more sports/ fitness games. In 2011, Sony asked Sumo to develop the third instalment of the puzzle-platformer game ‘Little Big Planet’ which was released in 2014, as well as developing a cross controller pack for ‘Little Big Planet 2’. Also in 2014, they began assisting a range of developers on ‘Disney Infinity 3.0’ which is an Action-Adventure type sandbox. It is also described as a ‘toys to life’ game which is an arising genre in the games industry, ‘toys to life’ is described as a billion dollar market yet has existed for less than five years so it is a highly profitable market for an independent company such as Sumo digital to be a part of. Sumo are currently assisting developers on Microsoft’s ‘Crackdown 3’ set to be released in the second quarter of 2016, the critically acclaimed series’ previous instalment was released six years ago so this is likely to be another profitable game for Sumo Digital.

Multi-Platform

A variety of Sumo Digital’s games are available on multiple-platforms, this is multi-platform. In recent years, multi-platform has become more and more frequent within the gaming industry. This is because of technological convergence, technological convergence is when different technologies perform similar tasks; in the gaming industry this means platforms are able to support the same games. This is again highly beneficial, in terms of profit, to Sumo because it means they are able to reach a wider audience. There are of course some boundaries. For example, you are not likely to find ‘Xbox Fitness’ in the Google Play Store. This is simply because mobile devices are yet to have the technological capabilities require for this game. In order to reach certain platforms, such as iOS or Android, additional development must be done for a game which supports these platforms. When developing ‘Sonic & All-stars racing transformed’ in 2012 this is exactly what Sumo did, and in 2014 the iOS/Android versions of the game were released.

Regulatory Bodies

In the UK, publishers are not obliged to submit a game for classification. However, many publishers may find it difficult to sell their games. Sumo is not a publisher so they do not decide whether it requires a classification or not and in most cases will just be instructed what the certificate should be. Since 2010, PEGI has provided the primary classification system for most publishers. The majority of Sumo’s games are aimed towards family or child audiences, their most common PEGI rating is in fact a 12+. Their most recent exception is ‘Crackdown 3’ which is rated PEGI 18.

Development Software

Development software is a program which enables Sumo to program, test, and fix bugs when creating and maintaining their games.