Based in Queensland
Auran's philosophy "Don't predict it. Create it." is reflected in all our products and services. Auran is Australia's most exciting interactive entertainment company. Our focus is on the creation of computer games and the technology to drive them.
Auran is known for developing the Trainz railroad simulator series, which uses their self-developed middleware game engine Auran Jet.
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Prior to 2006
Founded in Brisbane, Australia, when computer programmer Greg Lane met Gold Coast entrepreneur and current business partner Graham Graham Edelsten in 1995.
Greg Lane, Auran's ceo, regards Auran as resulting from a 1995 New Year's resolution. Formerly a contract programmer with a consuming passion for regular board games and computer games, he was persuaded on this occasion by Graham Edelsten, Auran's co-founder and now Auran's Chief Financial Officer, to try writing computer games. As it turned out, Mr Edelsten's varied hand of experience in business development in many parts of the world and background in law, proved of equal importance to the company when it sought finance for technology development and a contract with American games publishers.
Success came early. In 1997 Auran's first game, the Dark Reign computer strategy product, was launched onto the market selling more than 650,000 units to date (at time of article print). Its success was no fluke. The company used the pervasive marketing power of the Internet, creating a large fan community before its launch. As Greg Lane recalls, their Internet promotion peaked at 250 Dark Reign sites and excited the retail channel. "This prompted our publisher Activision to increase the intended marketing effort fivefold," he says.
In mid '96 Auran had taken the Dark Reign concept to the United States. Mr. Lane says they had just two weeks to find a publisher before their capital ran out. "From the response we knew we would not only get the money we were after but a lot more. The next 18 months was spent developing the product to make it a perfect fit for the US and European markets.
That success is however likely to be quickly overtaken with the release of Auran's new authoring product AURAN Jet, which the company believes to be a cornerstone product.
In 1999, Auran has grown to almost 40 staff, including 11 multi-tasked programmers, 3 game desginers and 4 artists. Mr Lane commented that the company is highly profitable and 95% of its products are sold overseas.
Greg Lane says AURAN Jet is a platform or tool that a professional will use for authoring games, in much the same way as an accountant for example would use Excel spread sheets.
"The revenue for Auran will come from games sold that utilise the Jet platform," he says. "This makes its potential markets far bigger than Dark Reign, for example." Lane believes AURAN Jet will propel Auran's status from that of a small company to potentially one of Australia's top five IT companies and he predicts it could grow the company's revenue by 400 percent in the product's first year.
Commonwealth Government's assistance through a $2.048 million AusIndustry R&D Start Grant played a crucial role in developing AURAN Jet. Greg Lane says convincing AusIndustry of the project's value was made easier because the technology on which AURAN Jet is based had already been successfully sold in an earlier version. The particularly tight business procedures and practices the business had adopted since its inception was another factor in accessing the Grant, he believes.
Interestingly Auran sees the benefit of the Commonwealth R&D Grant being as much in the recognition it afforded the company. "It gave us very high credibility which we were able to leverage through into the venture capital market."
The company believes that R&D is crucial for ongoing success. Already more than $6 million has been invested in the AURAN Jet project and it's not unusual for Auran to spend up to 80% of a project's cost on R&D. Average commitment of at least 50%.
On the issue of locational advantages for software developers, Lane sees both pros and cons in the company's Australian base, but believes the pros outweigh the negatives. "The exchange rate makes production here very cheap but I think the multicultural nature of Australian society is even more significant. It enables us to produce products that appeal to both the American and European market." [1]
Tony Hilliam took over as Auran Director and CEO in 2005 and is assisted by Graham Edelsten, Director and CFO (Graham is also the Secretary at the GDAA).
Auran recently completed work on Version 2.0 of its advanced 3D game development engine, Auran Jet as well as the latest in its hit Train Sim franchise, Trainz Railroad Simulator. TRS2006 now has over 200 000 registered users worldwide and the Trainz forum recently logged its one millionth post.
Auran's main development project at this time is a Competitive Online RPG named Fury. Fury has created much industry excitement since its unveiling at E3 2006. The game is a unique blend of the MMO genre (involving combat, advancement and teamwork) and the FPS genre (invovling instant action, fast pacing and diverse game types). MMORPG.com gave Fury the award for "Most surprising game at E3" along with honourable mentions for "best graphics", "best game", "best graphics" and "best of show" and the much anticipated title is set for launch in 2007.
Hive, planned for 2007, is described as "an online socialization environment that allows users to occupy a 3D avatar and interact with other users online. Participants will be able to host parties in their own self styled virtual apartment, chat, flirt, listen to music and buy the both virtual and real products."
In addition to its development credentials, Auran is rapidly expanding as a games publisher in the Australian, New Zealand and Asian games markets. With a strong distribution connection Auran currently provides on average four quality titles a month to the Australian, New Zealand and Asian games markets. Having connections with leading publishers and developers such as Irrational Games, Jo Wood Productions, 1C Company, Techland, Paradox, Monte Cristo, Cyanide Studios, Stardock, Whiptail Interactive and many more, Auran is aiming to be the publisher of choice for independent game developers.
In 2005, the company has 70 staff, a studio in Sweden, and plans to open another in China within two years. [3]
"At moment, we are in the low millions (towards $10 million) of revenue and our aim is to get into the hundreds of millions," Mr Hilliam said.
"We plan to blow our current figures out of the water by 300 per cent in the next few years."
Auran's Three Core Activities
Auran Jet is a development engine that can be used to create a variety of 3D applications including, games, simulation and training software. Originally designed to provide a powerful and extensible foundation upon which to develop Auran's range of commercial software products, Jet is now available for external use. Building on Jet's genre neutral design, developers can significantly reduce the time it takes to get a software product to market.
In late 2007, Auran Development went under liquidation, relieving most of their 70 staff a week before Christmas. Their online action game, Fury, had not met sales expectations. Auran Games continues to develop games with a skeleton staff of 15 employees.
On the 5th of August 2008, Auran CEO, Tony Hilliam posted on the Fury website that the Fury servers and website were to be shut down within 48 hours after all avenues to make the game profitable had been exhausted.
"We have reached our time limit to find a solution that would help us keep the Fury servers open. Sadly, no solution has been found and so we have no alternative than to shut the servers down in 48 hours"
Bridge It
Auran 24 Macquarie St, New Farm Brisbane Queensland Australia 4051
P.O. Box 1026 New Farm 4005 QLD Australia
Auran Games, developer of the long running Trainz franchise, today announced that Beta Testing had commenced for the new Trainz Simulator 2009: World Builder Edition (TS2009).
Kotaku AU reports that the time of Auran's Fury is coming to an end.
You've got to hand it to Tony Hilliam. He's damn resilient.
It's not really new news for anyone who's been keeping tabs on the Auran situation, but an article at The Courier Mail re-iterates that Auran is indeed alive and still developing games.
We've had various insights into where Auran went wrong last year, from Auran CEO, Tony Hilliam, and Lead Designer, Adam Carpenter, as well as
Tony Albrecht, console games programmer, inventor of the Tony Unit, knows all about getting the shaft. And I don't mean that in a rude way.
Warcry has an exclusive interview with Auran CEO, Tony Hilliam, and Lead Designer, Adam Carpenter, on Fury.
You may remember the Ebay donation plea (of which a few Sumeans did donate to) by an ex-Ratbag Games staff member shortly after Midway
We've had plenty of Auran related news of late, lots of opinions and responses, and considering the situation at Auran in the last week and day, it's quite understandable.
