We've been a week here and have spent long sessions with 8 customers. We met with 4 game companies (Ntreev, Softmax, Nexon, KRGsoft), 2 VFX (SamG, Digi-Art) and 2 Design/Vis (Nod Design, LG Electronics). Kind of crazy schedule but we've been researching why Korea is growing like 50% a year for 3ds Max. 3ds Max is used in about 95% of the game companies here as we really "own" Korea. Korea has seen an explosion in online games, casual and mobile. Console and PCs haven't been as strong due to piracy issues. We have most of the VFX business too, though Maya is here and there.

We've been researching our technology roadmap with Korean customers to make sure we're aligned to their needs and to support where they want to grow. The good news is that seem to want the same things as the North American Game companies we talked to at GDC. That keeps it a lot easier for us. There are enough differences in workflows to tangle us up as it is.

Spending a few hours each with these customers helps us to really get into their issues and to test our assumptions about what they need. One of the ideas we came up with was to research the possibility of allowing you to write out files from a new version that would load into a prior version. This would work for most things, but not for third-party data. The question is whether this is useful for anyone? We think we can load most data from a newer version if we design the new version to support that. However, nothing we can do about all that third-party data from plug-ins. It might work - it might not. It would be better than anything else we can do right now, but is it worth the effort? Any thoughts?

Anyway, need to climb into the airplane for the trip to Brisbane and more visits.