DENNIS HARPER
INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS
FUN & GAMES
CLOUD and DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION, ONLINE PUBLISHING
As Senior Development Director Director at OnLive, Dennis championed and lead the development of an Enterprize line of applications, targetted on the OnLive Cloud Streaming Platform. Using the popular virtual world "Second Life" as a target , he grew the business over 3x and established "SL Go" as the number one subscription product for the entire company.
SL Go
SL Go was brought the virtual world of Second Life to Android Tablets and iPads for the first time ever. OnLive technology runs the application on a powerful cloud server, and streams ultra-high graphics to nearly any device or platform.
In order to market our serivice to a largly anonymous user base, we had to go "in-world" and establish our identity and brand. For a short time, I become somewhat of a celebrity in the Second Life community. What a blast!
At EA, as Senior Director, Global Online Publishing, Dennis helped to create the burgeoning digital distribution business, growing revenues from less than $1MM to over $25MM annually. He was an early evangelist for digital and online technologies in games. His guidance and designs paved the way for EA Origin, the company's premiere digital distribution system.
EA LINK
EA LINK was the project that launched EA into the wide spread adoption of digital distribution. Originally called "EA Download Manager", the digital delivery system was completely redesigned from backend to frontend.
EA LINK not only delivered content, but handled complex purchasing and entitlement flows. It had built in anti-piracy protection and even could patch every EA game you owned.
EA LINK was the precursor to EA's current digital distribution platform, EA ORIGIN.
SIMS 2 STORE
Long before "virtual currency" and "downloadable content" (DLC) were buzzwords, my team setup the Sims 2 Store.
Sims 2 players could browse for their favorite items, purchase them using "simoleans", then they would be automatically downloaded to the desktop and available the next time the game was launched. This had never been done previously.
GAME PARTNERS
Global Online Publishing touched nearly every frontline PC game published by EA. Some games needed more online feature than others. For instance, my group setup the Sporepedia for SPORE, as well as all the online code redemption and entitlement systems.
My role in Online Publishing was one of an internal evangelist for common online technologies.