Torque for SBIR/STTR Development

Hello everyone, as you see we are introducing some new ideas on the site this week. As well as a new licensing model. I wanted to take the time in this blog to speak on the subject of Torque for non-entertainment game purposes. Torque has been used in the past for many non-entertainment purposes- primarily SBIRs and STTRs (described below). Companies and organizations like NASA, IBM, and many other that we can’t mention for contractual reasons, have found that Torque is the perfect solution for them. Most of these products have very different needs than a typical game so having source can be critical, in many non-entertainment projects, source is required for code escrow purposes or others reasons. These research projects typically pay in a phased approach, and these concepts of phases will help us introduce a new Research Model Licensing.

If your organization works in the space of these types of projects we can definitely help you achieve your goals with our technology. We are taking a partnership approach with phased research projects. We have decided to take a big step forward in helping to open this market to more people by modeling our Research Licensing to meet the needs of SBIR and STTR projects.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, SBIRs are research programs set aside for small business run by the U.S. government. ( btw…the government thinks of multi-million dollar companies as small businesses.). The big, big, companies aren’t allowed to bid on these projects. STTRs are very similar; however, they require a partnership with a University. Many businesses have built themselves on SBIRs including companies from our industry like SpeedTree.

Many of these projects are broken down into 3 phases.
Phase 1 - Proof of Concept ( ~ 100,000 award)
Phase 2 - Prototype (~ 750,000 award)
Phase 3 - Commercialization ( no limit that I know of)

We are focusing on the first two phases as those are most common and it’s where teams need the most help getting started. So for small teams running on smaller budgets this will be very helpful to you. Here are the options:

License the technology for free during Phase 1 until you get to Phase 2 then pay 10% of your Phase 2 award.

Or...

License the technology for 10% of your Phase 1 award.

Both options are per project basis and the license does not stay with the organization outside the work for the project. In other words once the project is done the license is as well. By deferring the payment this can help you spend more money on developing the solution upfront and divert the payment until the second round. If you are spending less on technology in the first round this will give you an edge on your competition.

We still offer other custom licensing solutions such as Studio and Per Project models. We also work with with non SBIR and STTR projects such as Serious Games and MS&T (Modeling, Simulation and Training) projects if you meet a few conditions depending on your project. For more information on the new Research License please contact me:

Donald Harris
donaldh@instantaction.com

{EDIT for clarity}

We seem to be getting quite a few comments in other threads about this post so I wanted to add in some more info to help clarify. Please note that the licensing model is to help the small organizations out there. We don't expect many organizations to pay the up front cost unless they have a more sure shot at the project and know they will get to the second phase. If a company pays on the first Phase of an SBIR they would save money on the license as the second phase is generally larger. We expect most customers to opp for the Free license and pay on Phase 2. Yes it MAY be a bit a higher cost to them but they didn't have to pay anything up front. We are not asking the architect in his home office to pay 75,000 dollars for one license to build a virtual walk through. For those cases please contact me personally so that we can work out a custom solution for you and the product you want to build. Remember this addition to our licensing model is here to help the smaller teams out there play in the bigger picture of SBIR projects.