GDC was crazy this year. Although many people – myself among them – thought that GDC would be a bit down in attendance, it sure didn’t appear that way. Everywhere I went was total chaos. I’ve never, ever seen a line for a keynote at Moscone like the one for Iwata’s speech. If my personal observations are useful as a metric, it seems GDC had a good year.
I’ve been focusing a lot on the game engine space lately, and the show saw really strong showings from a number of middleware companies. Crytek’s CryENGINE (in their booth) and Digital Extremes’ Evolution Engine (behind closed doors) have really come out fighting to take some market share from Epic’s Unreal Engine. (And I assume Id and Valve were both having conversations about their technology behind the scenes!) Emergent’s Gamebryo Lightspeed, Trinigy’s Vision, Terminal Reality’s Infernal Engine, and Vicious Software’s Vicious Engine are battling it out in the middle-priced tier. And Unity and Garage Games’ Torque both came in with strong low-cost solutions. Other companies showing their products in this space that I got to look at were Dassault’s 3DVIA Virtools, Digini’s Blade3D, and Terathon’s C4 Engine. I’m sure there were more… and that’s not even counting the MMO engines like HeroEngine and BigWorld, or the vast array of middleware libraries and tools!
I spent more time on the expo floor this year than ever, and I still didn’t get a chance to see everything. If you saw anything you thought was particularly cool, I’d love to hear about it! I am very excited about the evolution of tools and services available to game developers. But now I’m wondering… how can anyone keep up with them all?

Recently I surveyed a large group of industry executives, seeking information on their thoughts and perceptions of game engine middleware. Last week I shared the general results of that survey with you; this week we’ll talk about some of the technology-related results.
The survey was split into two sections, one for production-oriented folks, and one for technologists. This blog post will describe the results from the technologists, who were largely CTOs, VP Techs, Tech Directors, Engineering Managers, etc. The questions were focused to get their opinions about game engines in general, not feedback on particular ones: what features do they look for in a game engine, what tools do they expect, what engines are they currently using, that sort of thing. We could have delved much deeper into this, but perhaps that’s something to address later.

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During the past few console generations, using a licensed game engine has gone from being a rarity to something common and acceptable. During the past few months, the number of middleware game engines available has suddenly increased from a relative few to something that needs a spreadsheet to keep track of. Whether the increasing number of available engines is due to developers deliberately addressing a perceived need in the market, or simply diversifying their revenue stream due to the lousy economy, is not immediately clear. So it seems like a good time to take a look at the game engines available and take the pulse of the game industry on game engines. What are we really looking for, and are there market opportunities for new game engine middleware entrants? In the early part of February 2009, I sent out a survey to industry executives asking for their feedback on the use of game engines.

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Today Gamasutra updated their site, changing the format of the front page and adding a host of new features. One of the things they’ve added is the ability to host a blog on the site, and I’ve started up an “expert blog” on game engines. At “The Engine Blog” I’ll be initially sharing the results of the game engine middleware survey I conducted a few weeks ago, and it will transition to other engine-related topics. I’ll also cross-post the survey results posts here on Satori. I’d love to hear what you think about the new blog!

I recently sent out a survey about game engine middleware to many industry executives, and also solicited folks on the Internet to fill it out. After trimming out some of the replies, I find that I’ve received about 100 high-quality responses. I’ve begun consolidating the info, and the results are very interesting – in some cases confirming suspicions I had but also in some cases contradicting them (which is more interesting ). Have been talking to a few folks about ways to communicate the information back to the developer community… stay tuned.
By doing this I’ve discovered some good ways and bad ways to ask questions that I hadn’t realized before I also am looking at this now and thinking it could be very valuable as a yearly survey, so as I consolidate the info I’m reading all the feedback and thinking of ways to re-jigger the questions. Thanks to all of you who replied, and those of you who left comments!