I half wonder if Enix licenses the tech just to tear it up and borrow snippets. How many Unreal games have they made despite being one of the early UE3 licensees? Most of their top tier franchises have all been in-house engines...
Simon: The last that I have checked, none of S-E's Unreal based projects really netted much for the company. Most have been failures, and frankly this does question what they plan on doing with Luminous Studio.... A in-house engine/SDK suite that competes with UE4.
@Duvelle: I have no way of knowing how much profit TLR brought in. Kris Graft reported 580,000 sales (http://gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23736) mid 2009 but I have no equivalent information on total revenue, costs incurred, or net profits; certainly none taking recent Steam sales into account.
Based on the problems with FFXIV, I surmise that Luminous Studio has certain limitations with rendering multiple characters on screen, an issue that is less likely to plague UE4. I suspect that was one of the factors that drove the use of UE3 with TLR, since it's battle system involves rendering upwards of 30 characters in combat at a time. It's quite possible that Squeenix is looking to produce more high-character-count games.
Hm it is still odd that they rather license a quasi-competitor (not really, since they said they'd not license their next Luminous installment to others) instead of adapting their very own engine to a wider internal use...
Keep in mind that Squeenix is in the business of making games, not making game engines. Just because they've made an engine in the past doesn't leave them beholden to exclusively use that engine. That was the train of thought that derailed some of their games in the past, such as FFXIV.
Ultimately, a smart producer is going to weigh the best tools for the project against the cost of using that tool. A smart company that makes a wide variety of games is going to keep a wide selection of tools within reach. Plus, this also equips Squeenix studios like Eidos, which made Deus Ex: HR in Crystal Tools, with another tool potentially better suited to first-person shooters.
Simon: As much as you do have a point, there is a problem. Square-Enix is a business first and for most. Same goes with Epic Games. And honestly, when you develop a gaming engine... it's not a cheep undertaking. Not when you are looking for something that has "good graphics", is extendable for a verity of platforms, is easy to program for, etc.
Square has been one of the few business' in gaming that has seen better days on the ledger... so the question is, how much are they playing to complete Luminous Studio and become a licensee of Unreal?
Because given the amount of control that Epic has now with it's middle-ware, it can't really be cheep? Can it?
You obviously have never seen the Unreal codebase.... lol! It is much easier to code your own tech than try and decipher that mess of code. Perhaps they have improved this in Unreal 4.0?
Square Enix is likely doing this to accelerate development for its Western studios and properties, teams that are already fairly familiar with the UE pipeline.
Meanwhile, its core internal teams -- already part of the process with regards to Luminous engine development -- can exploit their own tech with less of a learning curve.
I did not work with unreal tech myself apart from quick look at UDK (happened to be mostly developing/using in house/other engines and now Unity) but from colleagues who did use Unreal 2.5 and 3, the attitude was mostly the same: good tools, but run time code is a hard to understand mess.
But it is senior (typically - non technical) studio people that decide on what tech to buy, not engineers... so Unreal busyness model works well - show the VPs a nice "candy wrapper" (and they will not look inside till the deal is done).
I heard U4 was mostly re-engineered (?) to be nice for next gen HW. People I personally know from Epic are very smart and capable. So I wish to believe U4 is good not only as a tool set and for presentations...
The industry IMHO needs a good (and not super expensive) engine ready when next gen is out. Most companies will not afford developing own tech again. Unity is not there for AAA, Sony's Phyre is not the whole solution, Frostbite is not for sale, Gamebryo and Torque and others... can not be seriously considered for next gen AAA.
Based on the problems with FFXIV, I surmise that Luminous Studio has certain limitations with rendering multiple characters on screen, an issue that is less likely to plague UE4. I suspect that was one of the factors that drove the use of UE3 with TLR, since it's battle system involves rendering upwards of 30 characters in combat at a time. It's quite possible that Squeenix is looking to produce more high-character-count games.
Ultimately, a smart producer is going to weigh the best tools for the project against the cost of using that tool. A smart company that makes a wide variety of games is going to keep a wide selection of tools within reach. Plus, this also equips Squeenix studios like Eidos, which made Deus Ex: HR in Crystal Tools, with another tool potentially better suited to first-person shooters.
Square has been one of the few business' in gaming that has seen better days on the ledger... so the question is, how much are they playing to complete Luminous Studio and become a licensee of Unreal?
Because given the amount of control that Epic has now with it's middle-ware, it can't really be cheep? Can it?
Meanwhile, its core internal teams -- already part of the process with regards to Luminous engine development -- can exploit their own tech with less of a learning curve.
But it is senior (typically - non technical) studio people that decide on what tech to buy, not engineers... so Unreal busyness model works well - show the VPs a nice "candy wrapper" (and they will not look inside till the deal is done).
I heard U4 was mostly re-engineered (?) to be nice for next gen HW. People I personally know from Epic are very smart and capable. So I wish to believe U4 is good not only as a tool set and for presentations...
The industry IMHO needs a good (and not super expensive) engine ready when next gen is out. Most companies will not afford developing own tech again. Unity is not there for AAA, Sony's Phyre is not the whole solution, Frostbite is not for sale, Gamebryo and Torque and others... can not be seriously considered for next gen AAA.
There are only a few "nex-gen" engines as far as I can see and right now it seems like only one of these (UE4) is up for grabs.