Well Begun Is Half Done

The continually delayed update to the Eminence Luxury Services website (completely my bad…you have no idea!) will finally go live this week. Although I’m estimating that we’ll only have about 70% of what I’d originally envisioned for the update, we’re close enough to the finish line that I have a good picture of what’ll be there and what’s still to come. In no particular order:

Design. The new website looks better. A lot better. Although we’ve avoided Flash like the plague that it is, we’ve managed to add a bit of “flash” here and there to make the whole site look more animated. We've also significantly improved the overall “look and feel” of the site. Still to come: even more shiny do-dads!

Blog. This has actually been in progress for a while, and technology aside has been one of the most time-intensive parts of the new site, so it’s something I’m particularly jazzed about. If you’re reading this from the Owners’ Blog tab on the site, you should be aware that the words your reading here are just a shadow copy of the original. Although nicely syndicated over to our main site, the blog itself is actually hosted at Blogger: eminenceluxury.blogspot.com. I’d of course love for you to stay here on the Eminence site forever, but by surfing over to Blogger you can post comments and leave feedback on my inane ramblings. Also: if you’re particularly resourceful you’ll discover a link to my personal blog, reading which is almost as much fun as driving a Ferrari. I swear.

Concierge. I write a lot about our fleet of vehicles because that’s really my wheelhouse, but in fact Eminence Luxury provides many services above and beyond exotic and luxury rentals. We have a full service in-house concierge staff who are absolute wizards when it comes to procuring you the best Las Vegas has to offer. They got short shrift on the previous incarnation of the website, so we’ve tried to beef up their pages this time around. Still to come: we’d actually built a lot of impressive pages showing off all of the amazing things our concierge staff could do, then realized that most of these things involved other companies and, particularly, photos of their properties and copies of their logos. That turned into a nightmare of meetings, approvals, and etc., so for the time being those pages are disabled. Hopefully we’ll get this all resolved soon; in the meantime, know that the legal problems haven’t slowed our concierge staff down at all and they’re always available to provide you service that fits like a glove.

Shopping Lists. We’ve spent millions of dollars building up our fleet, but it’s just not possible to own every vehicle ever made. Regardless of how many we already have, there are always a few cars on our “to buy” list, and on the new site we have a page that shows you what’s next on the list. We also have a page with some of our fantasy selections. Still to come: visitor feedback! We want to know what you’re interested in renting. Soon there’ll be a way for you to make suggestions online.

Banners. Boy, if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me for an Eminence themed banner that they could post to MySpace, I’d have a whole bunch of nickels. On our networking page we’ve not only got links to all of our online presences, we’ve finally got banners! Still to come: As of this writing there’s only one banner. Although Jaime has penned a ton of great “catchphrases”, I’m betting I won’t have time to create the actual banners in the next few days. Within the next week however there’ll be a virtual cornucopia of choices. My favorite so far? “Dice? Check. Date? Check. Diablo? Check!”

Galleries. This is the #1 thing that won’t be ready in time for the site launch. One of the great things about owning a bunch of great looking cars is that…well, they look great! Our original concept was to have a massive gallery of stills and video showing off the cars. We’ve been very busy with our cameras lately, but we don’t yet have quite as much content as we planned and we’re not particularly inclined to go off half cocked. In another week or two we’ll have some great desktop wallpapers, shots of behind-the-scenes video shoots, and more than a few candid photos of satisfied clients, but until all of that is ready we’ve removed the planned “galleries” section of the new site.

Photos. Last but very much not least: Ever wondered what the core Eminence team looks like? Well wonder no more! That sultry voice on the other end of the phone and the illiterate fool who replies to your email is no longer a phantom. Finally you can put a face to the name!

Respect Isn't Earned...It's Gamed!

I spent over a decade working in videogame development, and though it was a great experience (and, sometimes, not), one thing always bothered me: people who work in the videogame industry just don’t get enough recognition or, well, love. Sure, most of the publishers and developers take good care of their people--I did a lot of work with Electronic Arts over the years and I can say first hand that the gym at EARS is very nice, and “EAts” up at EA Canada makes some very decent food--but I’ve always thought that people in the industry should be getting more.

Let’s take one game, completely at random natch: oh…how about Halo 3. First-day sales were reported at $170 million, with some sources claiming as high as $200 million. Many news outlets compared this with the opening day box office of Spider-Man 3 (reputed to be about $150 million), though as this article points out those comparisons are somewhat fallacious.

Note that I don’t quite agree with either the H3-SM3 comparison or the article linked above. Several months after the fact, it appears that Spider-Man 3 raked in about $900MM worldwide and Halo 3 finished somewhere in the $400MM neighborhood. The difference in pricing ($9-11 for a movie ticket, $60 for a 360 game) is also significant, but I think not truly a relevant comparison. The number to look at here is dollars per hour of entertainment, which at the very least brings the two much closer…and results in Steven King putting us all to shame.

Perhaps the most important number is production cost vs. gross: SM3 apparently cost about $260MM to produce, and based on nothing other than a guess I’d put H3 at $35MM (but could easily be off by 50% or more, in either direction). Comparing ROI as straight dollars brings the two much closer, and in percentage terms H3 comes out well ahead. [Note: you may recall that I spent a dozen years making videogames; I don’t have an MBA or, for that matter, a college degree. I’m sure there are infinite subtleties I’m overlooking here.]

In any event, to level the playing field I consulted IMDB and found a little movie, also released in 2007, with a to-date worldwide box office gross reported at $311MM (and a production cost of $85MM): Ocean’s Thirteen.

Now off the top of my head I can name several members of the Oceans Thirteen cast--possibly even 13 of them!--as well as the director, at least one of the screenwriters, and a producer or two. I’m fairly conversant with the game industry, but I’d be hard pressed to name more than two or three of the people responsible for creating Halo 3. Before you get offended by my ignorance, let me distract you with this: when the “above the line” staff from Ocean’s Thirteen goes to an award show, an after party…possibly whenever they use a public restroom…they get a swag bag worth thousands of dollars. Working in the game industry for all those years, I never even saw a bag that could be used to hold swag, let alone any actual swag.

And here’s one that really torques my undies: free tickets. “Creatives” in the film business get all kinds of discounts--up to 100%--to check out the competition. If you’ve made one reasonably good movie in your life, you’ll probably never have to pay to see a film ever again. In games, the developers are sometimes lucky to get two free copies of their own work. I think it’s incredibly important when making games to be up to date with what’s going on in the industry, current trends and the “state of the art”, but the vast majority of the time this involves a trip to Fry's and paying full retail.

There are all kinds of reasons behind this, from the fact that almost no one in game development looks like Brad Pitt--although I do know one brilliant programmer who’s the spitting image of Joaquin Phoenix--to differences in the underlying cost of goods and the incremental production cost. It’s an interesting subject, and one I may go on about more later (check The Geek’s Garage for updates, if you dare), but I digress.

Unfortunately I am but one man, and there’s not much I can do to change the way the videogame industry works. (Note: If you work for IGDA, AIAS, Spike, or any of the other major videogame award-givers, and particularly if your award show is staged in Las Vegas, please hit me up for help with your swag bags!) They say that every change begins with one step, so I have decided to take the step of offering a discount to everyone in the videogame industry.

This deal is good for anyone who works in games at the professional level, be that on the development side (engineers, artists, designers, etc.), the production side (producers, directors, managers of all flavors), marketing, PR, support staff (hi there Kristen in accounting!), whatever. I’m not above trying to score a little free publicity either, so the videogame press is also welcome to participate. If your job is above the level of being required to wear a blue shirt with yellow lettering on it, you’re good.

So next time you’re in Vegas, find out what it’s like to drive a real exotic car rather than a superbly rendered one. Decompress after your last project and party it up at any of the fantastic clubs in town. Whatever you’re looking for (mind out of the gutter, thank you very much!), we’ll set it up and you’ll save. It’s my small way of recognizing everyone who works so hard, saying thank you, and showing some love. And if in return you want to bring me a free copy of your latest game, you go right ahead…!

The Geek Garage

I come from a background in videogame development; I started out as a line-level programmer and, over the course of a dozen years, worked my way up to engineering management and then president of my own company. That means I have a lot of technical knowledge under my belt, so much when Eminence has technology needs to be addressed I’m usually the first--and often the last--stop.

For the course of the last month or two, our big technological need was a new version of the website. I’d thrown the current version together fairly quickly, and it wasn’t really competitive or up to snuff. It’s hard to add content or adjust the fleet, and it just plain doesn’t look all that great; it certainly doesn’t give off the “luxury service” aura that a company like Eminence Luxury Services deserves.

According to the original plan the new version of the website should have been ready to launch over the weekend, but things have been very busy around the office, and as a former game developer I’m not particularly conversant with the concept of “being on time”, so I’m running way behind. My plan for today’s post had been to talk about some of the great new stuff we’ve got on the site, but as the site’s not yet live this seems a bit premature. Instead, I’ve decided to write up a few “behind the scenes” notes on my experiences developing the site.

Let me pause here and be very clear: of my vast regular readership--hi mom!--this entry will be of interest to exactly none of you. I’d highly recommend that you stop reading now. I’m sure that Jalopnik has some interesting recent car news, or if you really insist on doing something Eminence related perhaps you might check out the Eminence Luxury Services MySpace page. What follows is, at best, of interest only to nerds like myself, and by that I mean probably only the subset who work in videogame development and are interested in the differences encountered in web work.

Anyone still with me? No? Excellent! Now then, a quick list of thoughts, recommendations, and commentary, in no particular order:

[Update: Upon further reflection, I've decided that the people reading this blog really don't care much about website development. I also realized that I can--and, given the chance, likely will--go on at length about nerd stuff. To make things more pleasant all around, I've decided to start a second blog and relocate the long, rambling content of this post over there. If you want to continue reading, please click through to the original post, in all of it's glory, here.]