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Electronic Arts Buys Criterion, RenderWare
CFresquet writes "Gamesindustry.biz reports that Electronic Arts has purchased developer Criterion Software. Criterion is the game developer behind Burnout 3 and 'anticipated first person shooter Black', but also makes RenderWare, arguably the most popular 3rd party game engine solution used in PC, console, and hand-held game development. With this purchase, EA now suddenly has its fingers in the development of many of its competitor's games. Formerly independent studios now find themselves unexpectedly partnered with the gorilla of the industry, and EA could be in a position to leverage its ownership of this technology when negotiating with publishing agreements with studios." Intriguingly, this means that the engine technology powering Grand Theft Auto 3/Vice City (and GTA: San Andreas?) is now EA-owned, though Criterion's David Lau-Kee claims "a win for everybody", arguing the takeover gives RenderWare "the capability to step up today and say to the entire industry, you know, 'We'll help you out?'"
It certainly must be tempting to either add features that only EA games will be able to make use of, or to slow down development of the version they liscense to others while adding features for their own games.
Stop the world; I need to get off.
no doubt they'll decide to start pumping out crappy games from their newly purchased studios
/. is overrun by bed-wetting elitist nerds
let it be known, for anything other than servers, a *nix OS sucks
I somehow fail to see the alarm in this. Yes, EA now owns a development tool. Thats nice. Its not like they have any control over the companies using it. They can't exactly say 'Stop developing a competing product or we will pull the plug.' Did Borland have control over companies that used its C compiler? At worst, they will just make future releases garbage, and many companies will switch over to another tool.
In the interest of being fair, shouldn't /. have a Larry Probst icon with borg-like appendages?
In another news, RenderWare software, out of the blue and without a rational explanation, drops 20fps, crashes time after time and "inspires" a series of mediocre movie adaptations and sport games. The dev team at Criterion is still trying to figure it out.
suck after 3-5 years.
Considering that many EA bought companies flounder or suffer, EA has a bad track record handling good software companies.
...which would clearly fall into the realm of an antitrust lawsuit should it carry on long enough for evidence to mount.
And more importantly, would immediately lead to the disuse of Renderware as a platform.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
Many companies make a middleware bet, wrap their toolchain and game franchise around it. The mediocre ones ship one game (if they're lucky) and then die. The successful ones develop an engine, toolchain, and gameplay that they'd like to reuse for the sequels. In the past, they paid more money to RW and they were set. Now, the price is negotiable with the gorilla of the industry.
Strategically, it means every studio has to get off of Renderware ASAP or they could be crushed if EA ever looks in their direction.
Since Renderware is basically console-only, its only real competitors are/were NDL and Alchemy. Neither are as big, but both may be perceived to be needed to fight against EA.
(I'd post a disclaimer here, but its no longer relevant)
Everybody loves Lance?
While it's quite true that many of the games made by companies gobbled up by EA have become nothing but crap, that is irrelevent as RenderWare is not a game. At best, RenderWare will continue developing its software for license to other parties and will probably be used more and more in EA's projects. At worse, they'll turn it into EA-internal-only product and I'll suck. In either case, who cares? Developers can use anything they want to make their games, and those already in the process aren't going to suddenly find that the software stops working. All that matters to the consumer is having a good game.
This can mean nothing but canceled games, and studios getting bent over the deal-making table.
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Why would they do that? Epic and id thrive on engine sales. Licensing a game engine to other developers has become a very lucrative business, perhaps even more lucrative than selling the games themselves (would you rather have a single million-selling game, or a license fee off of a number of million-selling games?).
Good news for LithTech, GameBryo, Unreal Engine, Source Engine, id Software licensing and so on. All the other options available to middleware-using developers now that they have a good reason to make a switch.
You will be assimilated, resistance is futile.
Do not pass go, do not collect $200, in fact, we need your spleen and your left lung if it's not too much trouble.
I for one, hope that EA is like some kind of dying start, where it's gravity gets more intense as it gets full and they eventually explode all over the place.
It's interesting to note that RenderWare is also behind Konami's Winning Eleven soccer game.
Why would it be anti-trust? Renderware is not a monopoly on gaming middleware.
It would be monopolistic behavior. It would mean that EA is trying to sabotage the efforts of its competitors by making Renderware work better on its own games while neglecting to mention this to anyone else.
If EA came out and told everybody that it used an optimized proprietary version of Renderware to make its own games, I suppose it would be OK. I don't think they would, though.
Rob
Unless they are a monopoly, which they aren't, this would be perfectly legal.
Having an internal version of a tool which is more advanced than the version you license externally is a perfectly legal business practice. It doesn't even strike me as particularly unfair.
With only a few exceptions, businesses do not legally have to sell their products on equal terms to all customers, nor do they have to make available all the technology and services they use internally. And, quite frankly, why the hell should they? They're paying for the development (or bought the company that paid for the development), it's entirely up to them what they do with the fruits of that investment. If they want to license some portions externally to recoup some costs, while retaining other portions as a competitive advangtage, they should be perfectly free to do so. And, under the law, they are.
The situation changes if they have a monopoly in a particular market. Then there are anti-trust provisions which come into effect. But without a monopoly, none of those considerations is relevant.
I'm not sure what you mean by the phrase "monopolistic behaviour". I would assume it to mean "doing stuff that you could only get away with if you were a monopoly", but EA isn't a monopoly in the games business, and Renderware doesn't have a monopoly of the games middleware business, so pretty much by definition I don't see how anything EA chooses to do with Renderware could be considered "monopolistic".
While Renderware is certainly the most popular console middleware provider by far, a minority of games actually use Renderware, so it might be hard to bring antitrust charges--Renderware certainly has far less of a monopoly than Sony does on the console market.
Anyways, I agree that EA probably doesn't give a rat's ass about the licensing revenues. My guess is they would be more likely to just stop licensing Renderware for future 3rd-party games than deliberately set mines in it. A precedent for this is when EA bought BlackBox, they made BlackBox stop licensing its cross-platform video codec to other developers.
It's quite likely that EA acquired Criterion as a somewhat defensive strategy--if they are intending to try and migrate their various studios to Renderware (which would ease the sharing of technology, assets, and employees between their studios), then by *not* acquiring Criterion they would be left quite vulnerable if Sony, Microsoft, or someone else acquired it.
Deciding to go with a particular middleware provider is a huge commitment even for a smaller studio--all of your code and tools are built around it, making it very expensive to switch. When you're EA and thinking of switching all or some of your studios to Renderware, it's an even bigger leap. EA will have to walk a fine line--if they start abusing their position, people will drop Renderware and a competing middleware provider will fill the vacuum, but if they "play nice", people will continue to use it at least for the next several years giving EA a nice leash on other developers, and possibly a slice of GTA[n] profits...
As the Playstation3 looms on the horizon, we may be entering an era where in-house graphics engines won't be able to compete with a dedicated large team who does nothing but develop and refine their engine. If Renderware had remained independent and was able to offer a good early PS3 implementation, it could have been a huge switchover; currently, it would be quite risky for anyone to switch to Renderware.
This also brings up the vulnerability of all middleware being acquired by someone like EA. Amusingly, the only way for a middleware company to guarantee the future would be to do something like GPL at least the API and specification of their middleware system, so that at least it would be possible for another provider to provide a compatible system in the event of a hijacking (although this would remove the "lock-in" advantage). A more exciting alternative would be if various smaller developers pooled resources and worked on some sort of open-sourced engine--as hardware power increases, graphics engines will continue to get more general-purpose and less game-specific, and the graphics engine itself will become less of a differentiating feature in the marketplace. Trying to make an GPL-like license that would be compatible with all the Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo SDK licensing might be tricky, but surely it's possible. The proliferation of open standards for games technology would also facilitate moving to a Hollywood studio business model for game developement, where developers are hired on a per-project basis, and standard toolsets make it easier for artists and to a lesser degree programmers to jump from project to project, making it easier to have the "small team in preproduction, huge team in production, small team in final testing/approval" structure.
A company doesn't have to be a monopoly to break anti-trust law. If it did, then why did the government bother to sue Microsoft? Clearly MS isn't a monopoly; they have Mac and Linux to worry about, among other OSes.
From the DOJ Antitrust Division's website:
[The anti-trust laws] prohibit a variety of practices that restrain trade, such as price-fixing conspiracies, corporate mergers likely to reduce the competitive vigor of particular markets, and predatory acts designed to achieve or maintain monopoly power.
[Emphasis added.]
--http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/overview.html
Rob
Because Microsoft exercises monopoly power in a particular market - viz. the market for desktop PC operating systems. Monopoly power means that they can pretty much set any terms they like for sale, and not have it affect their volume. You don't need 100% share to exercise monopoly power.
With EA and Renderware, I would say that Renderware is not sufficiently important for them to be able to exercise monopoly power with it. There are competitors. If EA put up their prices or reduced the functionality, games companies have other reasonable options. Indeed, the majority of games on the market are built without Renderware. Many use other pieces of middleware (e.g. Unreal Engine), and still others don't significantly use middleware at all.
I know it's the standard kneejerk Slashdot reaction whenever a big company buys something, but really, I don't see a potential anti-trust issue here at all.
(Of course, IANAL, just a game developer.)
I believe Criterion at one time used an optimized proprietary version of Renderware to make their own games with.