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Games Entertainment

Electronic Arts Buys Criterion, RenderWare 63

Posted by simoniker from the grand-theft-ea dept.
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?'"
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Electronic Arts Buys Criterion, RenderWare More

Electronic Arts Buys Criterion, RenderWare

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  • Will there be "secret" features inthe game engine? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by OneDeeTenTee ( 780300 ) on Wednesday July 28, 2004 @10:36PM (#9827730)
    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.
    • ...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.
      • 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 t
            • 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
              • 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

    • 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?).

  • yay, another supercompany turning a great industry into another money-whoring industry

    no doubt they'll decide to start pumping out crappy games from their newly purchased studios

  • 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.

    • Re:I see no alarm. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Daetrin ( 576516 ) on Wednesday July 28, 2004 @11:28PM (#9828055)
      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.'

      The problem is that i'm pretty sure RenderWare is a licensed product. They probably can't revoke the license for any current games, but they can certainly refuse to renew it for any upcoming games. So yes, they can in fact threaten to pull the plug.

      And even if i'm wrong about the licensing bit, they can always just refuse to release any new updates publically and keep them for themselves (and any companies who choose to cooperate with them) instead, which would be almost as bad.

      • So fucking what? It's not like Renderware is the only platform out there. It would be really fucking stupid for EA to do anything but what Criterion has been doing all along.
        • Renderware is considered one of the best, if not the best, platforms out there. EA is a very different company from Criterion. Criterion makes a couple games, probably one or two at a time at most. They also have their Renderware platform which they sell to many companies for (presumably a significant amount of money.)

          If Criterion were to stop selling their platform to other companies the average quality of current games would go down slightly, with the exception of Criterion's own games of course. Criter

      • EA acquiring Criterion is something I've been worrying about for a long time. I was kind of expecting someone like Sony to jump in at the last minute to try and prevent it, but oh well. Maybe this means Sony actually hopes to ship the PS3 with usable graphics libraries...

        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 doe

  • Let's call a spade a spade... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 28, 2004 @10:49PM (#9827794)
    In the interest of being fair, shouldn't /. have a Larry Probst icon with borg-like appendages?

  • In another news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Wednesday July 28, 2004 @10:52PM (#9827818)
    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.

    • Re:Well expect these companies to... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Alban ( 86010 ) on Wednesday July 28, 2004 @11:34PM (#9828082)
      Maxis is doing fine (the sims)

      Blackbox is doing fine (NFS underground).

      EA Tiburon (Madden) is doing fine.

      People say EA destroyed Origin, but Origin was long dead before being acquired.

      People bitch about EA's sports games, but those sports games are actually good.

      And and there are studios that didn't survive their acquisition (or rather, their best employees were relocated, and the rest was shutdown). And of course there are some games EA puts out that aren't as good as the rest.

      But get real, EA puts out a lot of really good titles. And EA must have great tools and libs. On consoles, a good portion of their games look better then the majority of other titles.

      Are you telling me FIFA doesn't look awesome? Are you telling me SSX 3 doesn't look gorgeous? (and runs at 60 fps on a ps2 for most areas)

      I've noticed that people always hate #1. No matter the industry, the sport, etc. People hate EA, people hate Michael Schumacher, etc, etc.

      • *sigh* I will never forgive EA for destroying two of the best game studios out there.. Origin and Westwood. Yes, some could argue that Origin was dead before EA bought them, but they forced Richard Garriot out, and when he left, all significant talent left with him. Westwood had some great games (namely Command and Conquer).. they sold well.. why would you disband a company that's making games that sell well? For the flop that was Earth and Beyond? Even Earth and Beyond was a pretty good game, it just
      • Maxis is doing fine (the sims)

        Apart from their office being shut down on 12 feb 2004 you mean, and some people getting severance packages. When even EA is shutting down studios like Maxis and Origin, it makes the rest of us nervous.

      • Never played the most recent iteration of FIFA, SSX3 didn't look that hot in my opinion, and it still has map holes, and I noticed TONS of slowdown.

        In any case, NBA Live 2004 was crap, looked bad, and was soundly thrashed by ESPN NBA 2K4.

        I've never considered EA #1 in anything, and I'never hated them, just the bad games they spit out. They make the big budget everyman game as far as I'm concerned. They don't just suck by default, but they also don't usually go the extra mile to polish up a game to take
    • Oh I don't know about that - Maxis seems to rebound after the pathetic SimCity3000... SimCity 4 with it's expansion pack Rush Hour is good for many hours of sleepless micromanagement and zoning cities.

      But then again... Medal of Honor: Allied Assault has enough security holes it could be considered the "Los Alamos Lab" of FPS games.

      Punk Buster anyone?
    • Westwood Studios anyone?

      I am still bitter at EA for not giving enough support to C&C Renegade, canceling C&C Renegade 2 and producing the abomination that is C&C Generals (which basicly ripped off Warcrap III)

  • EA now owns every developer who uses RW (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PenguinOpus ( 556138 ) on Wednesday July 28, 2004 @11:54PM (#9828193)
    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)

  • Will EA destroy all? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by chrispyman ( 710460 ) on Thursday July 29, 2004 @12:59AM (#9828495)
    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.
  • "and EA could be in a position to leverage its ownership of this technology when negotiating with publishing agreements with studios."

    This can mean nothing but canceled games, and studios getting bent over the deal-making table.

    • ..or ea being a preferable _publisher_ because they can throw in a 3d engine to the deal?

      it's not like renderware was free to start with.

  • Sounds like good news for middleware renderers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AltaMannen ( 568693 ) on Thursday July 29, 2004 @02:35AM (#9828840)
    Good news for LithTech [lithtech.com], GameBryo [ndl.com], Unreal Engine [epicgames.com], Source Engine [valvesoftware.com], id Software licensing [idsoftware.com] 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 [gamespot.com] soccer game.

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