Support: May 26, 2005

Archives

The online game, America's Army, was first developed as a recruiting tool. Costing over eight million dollars to develop, and $2.5 million a year to maintain, some five million people have downloaded the front end (player) software in the last three years. At peak times, over 5,000 players are online with the game simultaneously. Recruiters are satisfied with the number of prospects coming in because of the game. But others in the military, and the government, have also been attracted to the game. Units headed for Iraq have found the game useful for training. The Secret Service has found the game useful for planning and practice. Many other requests followed, to the point that a separate America's Army game had to be set up for the government users (who cannot, for various reasons, do their thing with civilian users hanging about.) Additional software has been added, in some cases, to support the special needs of government users. Thus the large investment in creating America's Army has made it possible for many other parts of the armed forces and government to create realistic online training systems. 

 

X

ad

Help Keep Us From Drying Up

We need your help! Our subscription base has slowly been dwindling.

Each month we count on your contributions. You can support us in the following ways:

  1. Make sure you spread the word about us. Two ways to do that are to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
  2. Subscribe to our daily newsletter. We’ll send the news to your email box, and you don’t have to come to the site unless you want to read columns or see photos.
  3. You can contribute to the health of StrategyPage.
Subscribe   Contribute   Close