Today, I visited the cultural site known as my bedroom. This unfortunately did not teach me a great deal about Cyprus culture. However, thanks to the technological wonders of the modern era, I was able to tune in for the Wargaming company visit.
My primary two takeaways from this company visit were related to Wargaming’s approach to competitive differentiation and the design process. Early on in the presentation, the presenters established that Wargaming was not a producer of first-person shooter games—the most popular type of war-oriented games by a significant margin—but instead hinged their games on more collaborative, third-person battles. This alone makes their products unique and allows them to focus their efforts towards competing with other large-scale war games instead of being forced to also contend with the entire genre of first-person shooters. Their design process, meanwhile, was characterized by rapid prototyping—their games began in the very basic form of board games with rudimentary game pieces, allowing them to make edits quickly and for low costs.
From a supply chain perspective, the main thing moving around in Wargaming’s operations is information, as they don’t have a ton of physical items to keep track of. The rapid prototyping ensures game designers at a single location can thoroughly flesh out an idea before involving programmers and other employees unnecessarily. This reduces the chances that a game will undergo production before a fundamental design flaw is found, which in turn reduces the chances that production would need to be halted and lowers the potential cost of mistakes and failures. This makes their supply chain more linear and installs an effective failsafe.
As far as a comparison between Cyprus and US business practices, I unfortunately don’t have a ton of information to work with, as the latency present in the international Zoom meeting made it difficult to pick up on what the presenters were saying. One thing I heard mentioned was that they have offices throughout several countries, each of which has very similar practices, which implies that there actually aren’t a great deal of large, fundamental differences in business practices between countries. Additionally, the concept of rapid prototyping has been mentioned in a few of my (domestic) engineering classes, which would be another similarity between the US and Cyprus.
