Paris Buttfield-Addison: My Best Tech

Through their business, Secret Lab, Paris Buttfield-Addison and Jon Manning are independent computer game and app developers based in Hobart.

Paris tells SmartCompany about how his favourite piece of technology has made his business much more productive, avoided price increases and saved thousands of dollars in annual costs. It has also eliminated any discussion of Secret Lab having to leave Tasmania.

“NBN is one of the most transformative, impactful things that could have happened to us.”

“Previously, we had the best ADSL2 connection you could get in Australia, maxing out at 23-24 Mbps down and 0.9 Mbps up, and it still wasn’t good enough. We couldn’t upload anything at a reasonable speed. We had to send hard drives or USB flash drives through the postal service, or we‘d leave uploads running overnight in the faint hope that they’d successfully complete while we slept.

“We were spending from 10-25% of our time trying to figure out how to send things to and from clients. This was not sustainable. You can’t run a game development studio for very long like that as it’s simply too stressful, expensive, time-consuming and unproductive.

“Our NBN service from Internode has exceeded our expectations. Now we’re turning work around faster. Because of that extra productivity, we don’t have to raise our prices, which is what we were looking at doing. Using the NBN is actually saving us money.

“As well as getting rid of our monthly Telstra LTE costs, we will save $2500-$3000 a year on no longer having to host two Mac Mini servers at a data centre in Las Vegas in order to assemble remotely the code for an app bundle for easy delivery to US clients. Now our internet connection is fast enough to run them from here, so that’s another saving when our contract runs out.

“Best of all, we no longer have to consider leaving Tasmania – a beautiful place to live and work – solely because we couldn’t get the connectivity we needed to make our business more effective, sustainable, and better equipped to make new games and software.”