There's a lot of third party middleware game engines out on the market: Epic Games has the Unreal Engine, Valve has the Source engine, Crytek has the Cryengine, Emergent has Gamebyro, id has the upcoming id Tech 5 and so on. But Electronic Arts is looking into the posiblity of doing the same thing with the engine that's the basis for their alien evolution sim game Spore.

In an article at the Rocky Mountain News, EA Games president Frank Gibeau states that the Spore engine is "extremely malleable. You could add RPG or action, you could take it to different platforms, like (Web-page) flash games, the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii." He even stated that they are looking into licensing the Spore technology to third party game developers. One big problem with this is that third party developers might not want to use technology that's owned by one of the world's largest publishers. A few years ago, EA bought Criterion Software who created the Renderware engine that was used before EA's purchase in tons of games (including the GTA III series). However, licensing of Renderware dissapeared overnight after the EA/Criterion acquisition.

[Via Kotaku]