Is it wise to take the 800 lb gorillas bananas?

Autodesk has already said they will be offering IaaS (infrastructure as a service) to their post production customers soon and Maya’s arrival as a service (SaaS) is also immanent. Through their acquisition of Softimage they have ICE, a platform for community tool building and the mod-kit work Softimage did with Valve. They also have Kynapse.

Add to all that Autodesk’s ongoing work to establish FBX as an interop layer between tools and the picture becomes clearer..

They want their bananas back! (Swear that’s the end of the gorilla analogy)

Since the early days “game engine” has referred to the runtime systems; rendering, collision, animation, memory management & profiling. Most still consider these elements to be the core value of a system. The engine companies make DCC tools, some of them very nice but they exist to support the runtime technology.

Autodesk could disrupt the game engine market by turning that on its head. Creation of assets is where the cost is in game production; you could argue that runtime is now the supporting technology.

By providing a complete SaaS content platform underpinned by an enhanced version of FBX that developers plug their chosen runtime into Autodesk could make a play for the content creation, pushing the engine providers back into their core runtime businesses in the process.

Trying to predict what Autodesk will do is never easy (or wise) but with content becoming the critical path on AAA projects I think the engine developers are going to have to fight Autodesk for ownership of the tool chain. Autodesk could even jump into the engine business just to make the fight interesting.