EA owns Renderware

yeah dunno.. we use renderware.. and well its a great crossplatform middleware.. it's interesting the position that EA are taking. In most cases the publisher always required the rights (pays for) the engine being used by the developer.. I guess this means that EA will tell prospective developers... use this (renderware) or forget about getting published with us....

yeah dunno... interesting development thou

damn, i hope EA dosent get manipulative on renderware users (burnout btw, is a top game).

Didn't they just by out crytech (farcry) not long ago? EA seems to be assaulting the middleware market head on.

Next stop, Havok!

< WARNING - RAVING LOONI - UP LATE WITH NOTHING TO DO!! >

I think its all good for the industry - the games industry itself is still growing - although massive compared to other industries, it has only just reached 50% of the population (USA and Japan are pretty much 50%). Considering the number 'un-developed' countries with massive populations and growing economies, the game industry is set for a fairly considerable long growth period. What this all means, is that there is a huge amount of room for competition and wrangling of things like middleware to try and gain market share. For big companies like EA, having common development platforms is a necessary evil, but for the huge number of other developers this is not an issue - while they are competitve, and especially if they seek niche markets or untapped markets (see below).

I dont agree all big publsihers are doing well either. The high majority are having very bad first quarters this year. EA and Activision being the exception rather than the norm.

As for developers, I think the focus needs to remain on creating great and _innovative_ games. The underlying development system should not be the critical problem - there is alot more available than Renderware and I think developers like CryTek that 'pop-up' with great development systems will always be around. Especially while there is demand for it.

I also doubt EA will bother with Havok since Renderware has MathEngine - you never know though, they could be on a buying spree.

To be honest the thing that concerns me the most about the games industry at the moment are the developers themselves - I talk with many developers and I really worry that developers are starting to get a little burrowed down in developing games that have little or no target audience. For example, MMO's and FPS while they seem like a great idea to develop for, the market statistics in the US should put a chill up any developers spine. MMO's represent only 7% of online gaming sales.. while Cards/Puzzle games are 52%!!! of online games sold. And FPS is a genre that also has a relatively small sales target audience (approx 12%) and it is jammed packed with competition. Few people even realise that in units sold there were only four FPS that made the top twenty games sold for last year (July2003-July2004). And only one made the top ten sales (Call of Duty at number 8). While the rest were RTS (Sims, Tycoons series and Warcraft etc). Amazingly, Sims superstar made number one with only six months of sales?!!

The point is, that the FPS market is a smallish market and with the large number of competitors in that market, making money on a title that can cost in-excess of 5 million dollars is going to be very difficult.

I would like to see games developers start to really tackle the known audiences, challenge them with games that are full of innovation and understanding of their audience - female audience? when was the last time you saw your Mum play a FPS. Its great to make a game and be happy that you completed it, but its so much the better if multitudes of others like it too..

Surely the Sims isnt going to be the number one title for the entire decade - its looking that way though. Anyone seen Sims 2.. there goes the next 5 years..

quote:there is alot more available than Renderware and I think developers like CryTek that 'pop-up' with great development systems will always be around. Especially while there is demand for it.

I'm not sure about that. Apart from Auran, I don't know of any Aussie Game Developers who are writing their own engine. It costs tens of millions of dollars to develop an engine if its going to compete with the likes of Unreal, Crytek, Doom3, HL2, etc. Why bother -save time and money and just licence it. I know Micro Forte spent millions and 6 years getting Bigworld to where it is now.

Nothing is going to "pop-up" without big bucks. Renderware is all the more important with its support of the consoles as well as PC. I don't think we're going to see too many more game engine developers entering the market and seriously challenging the current heavyweights in the near future. The demand from publishers is always going to be for better looking games -Is Sony or Xbox really going to let a developer make a game for its next-gen consoles that just looks ok? Developers will have enough to do without writing the engine from scratch.

I'm pretty sure that there are a number of Aussie Game Developers who are using Renderware - Blue Tongue, Atari, Bullant(?) who would be concerned about EA's intentions.

quote:Apart from Auran, I don't know of any Aussie Game Developers who are writing their own engine. It costs tens of millions of dollars to develop an engine

Ratbag have their own engine. Tens of millions is probably out by around an order of magnitude too. A few experienced coders could knock up something in a few months. Most of the effort is in the coding on the game-side. Although whether you class the tool chain as part of the engine or game is also another thing, because there's a fair bit of work involved in writing good tools.

"Rumor has it that new details on the Criterion deal emerged in EA's quarterly 10-Q filing.

The filing revealed that EA purchased Criterion for only $48 million which is a very low price for the RenderWare technology which has a self-proclaimed 85% market share and boasts around 250 employees working in multiple locations around the globe. Estimates show that well over $2.0 billion worth of games using the software have shipped worldwide."

[url="http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?section_name=dev&aid=3917"]Gameindustry.biz[/url]..

quote:Tens of millions is probably out by around an order of magnitude too.I said this in realtion to developing an engine that could complete with unreal2, doom3, HL2, etc. No some backyard job whipped up in a couple of months. I know a guy that built his own graphics engine in three days with very little sleep but the question is - is it any good? Can it run on a console? Can it run on a range of computers? Is it stable?

quote:Most of the effort is in the coding on the game-side. Do you mean coding gameplay? Most engines like renderware don't just come with a graphics engine. They also have (integrated or add-on) modules for sound, AI, physics, and networking. These take a hell of a lot of time to code and often are central to the gameplay.

quote:Although whether you class the tool chain as part of the engine or game is also another thing, because there's a fair bit of work involved in writing good tools.Yes there is. That is why all the game engines I listed have support for mapping tools and plug-ins for major 3d packages. In Renderware's case that have one of the most sophisticated 3dsmax exporters that I have ever seen.

Renderware is not cheap and if you could knock up a good engine in a couple of months then don't you think that's what every developer would do?

Here is my 2 cents:

Buying middleware companies, in my view, makes better sense than buying developers. Middleware is a more long-term tangible asset when compared to a game development company. Bullfrog, origin, 2015 and Legend are among a list of developers that quickly disintegrated after being purchased by publishers. Usually a key group of the development crew breaks off and creates the next best thing like ion storm, infinity ward, lionhead etc. When you buy a games company you are buying the employees, and when the employees leave because they don't like the new management what do you have?

When you buy middleware on the other hand you are also buying an entrenched group of clients who know the toolset. It would cost them many $10000 of dollars to switch to a competitors engine. Therefore they secure a long-term market.

48 mill is actually quite a lot if renderware is a private company. I'm sure the former CEO is laughing all the way to the bank.

To mutant_fork and co.

While there is a perception that engines cost "millions" to develop this is not always the case. What you are mainly referring to is asset generation - 70-80% of all development time/costs is chewed up in asset generation. Code generation is a small portion of product development, and of that portion the majority of code development is chasing bugs. Now, with engines like Unreal and Quake and such, they have 'cost' millions to build because they have had to continually re-integrate new systems (gfx, phys, ai etc) from an original system that _WASNT_ originally designed for them. Its simple engineering - you design it well, it goes together well. This is why bug chasing is such a huge portion of game coding, in fact any coding (see Google for references :-).

So comparing engines that are feature rich - _not_ content rich, there are many that are well below your millions estimate. One I commonly mention and I wish people would seriously look at is Nebula - it is free, was developed by a very small team (2 programmers), but released it to the community and it has grown quite huge in features - certainly comparable to any of the 200K+ engines. I have used Renderware, Unreal , and a number of in house engines (all of high quality) and Nebula ranks well - and imho is far superior in design to any of them. Also Orge is a good GPL engine too. Community based projects like these are good examples of how developers can reduce their costs by buying/developing technology for their game.

In fact, just Google sometime for "3D Game Engines" and you'll see what I mean, there is an abundance of development in this area - sure they are not all Unreal Engines, or Renderware, but there are many that are low budget, and growing (in features, not cost) - these are the 'popping up' engines I refer to. Who knows, in that search list may be the next CryTek.

With proper design and a decent knowledge base, as single coder in a year can develop a high quality engine. I know of a few in-house engines that were developed by one or two developers within the company in a short time period. Cross platform also, is not as critical as you make out - designed well an engine can be made to be quite easily portable - it all comes down to proper design. I have been lucky enough to work on a couple of PS2 titles and PC titles, and both of which shared codebases across platforms - and both were in house engines developed rapidly for PS2 and PC.

Renderware is a good package - but there is no need to put it on a pedastal and assume it is the best. In fact after using it I thought it was quite 'messy' in design terms, and quite difficult to implement externally developed features. Renderware is an off-the-shelf solution for 'generic' titles, and thats great, but it is hardly the best. Even Unreal engine - ask any Unreal engine developer about the wonderful entity system or, the ammunition object that embeds particle emitters - its not pretty. Just because these engines cost alot, does not necessarily mean they are good, or the best.

There are also commercial engines that are available, that people just dont know about:
- Insanity3D (used in Mafia and H&D2)
http://www.lonelycatgames.com/insanity3d/index.htm
- Multigen Vega Prime (used heavily in Mil sims)
http://www.multigen.com/products/runtime/vega_prime/index.shtml
- List of others for people to peruse..
http://fraktali.849pm.com/graphengines.html

But getting back to my point - which was: there are many other solutions than Renderware, and that while engines are in demand (which they obviously are) you will get people making them and selling them.
I even hope to have mine included in that, in the near future :-) .. the whole argument is a little pointless, since as my rant said, I doubt very much that EA's purchase will change alot at all - its not going to stop the developers popping up with a new engine and selling it. In fact it probably will provide more incentive for companies to do so - 40 odd million to make an engine, sounds like a pretty tidy incentive to me.. dont you think so?

EA only buy companies when it's a shortcut into a market, genre or technology that they're not already market leaders in. Look at the history of them buying Distinctive in Canada, Maxis and Westwood.

I think EA will probably be far less bothered about the current Renderware technology and much more interested in the technology that they've been developing for the emerging platforms. Everyone knows that EA spent loads of money on their launch PS2 titles and didn't make the sales back to cover the cost (but let's face it who did?) So they're actually being pretty astute at buying into middleware for the future rather than necessarily the present. They're spreading the cost of PS3 and Xbox 2 titles by owning the middleware, because lots of other developers will be sharing that cost with their Renderware licenses.

EA may well insist that their independant developers use Renderware in future, but they've never been against paying to provide a developer with technology before. They spent $1M buying in the Quake engine for the first Harry Potter PC game. Having been in meetings with them I know they're far more interested in the creativity and artistic talent of a team; they're view is that you can buy in technology if you need it - hence the Quake engine...

Has EA also bought Eidos?