Gaming firm moves away from proprietary technology.
Gaming firm moves away from proprietary technology.
Gaming company Square Enix has announced a licensing agreement to introduce Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3 middleware into its game development.
Square Enix is behind a number of successful franchises such as Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and Kingdom Hearts.
The company's success has been achieved through the use of proprietary technologies which were mostly optimised for each game.
But in order to ensure game quality and development efficiency for next-generation game systems, including consoles, PCs and network titles, Square Enix believes it needs a technology platform that can be used throughout the company.
"The complexity of next-generation game systems featuring high-def graphics and multi-core parallel processing poses a number of technological challenges to our game development," said Taku Murata, general manager of R&D at Square Enix.
"However, we can expedite our game development process significantly, while allowing extra time and resources to be spent on game design and mechanics, by establishing an effective technology platform."