gamebryo posts

The company behind one of the most popular game engines has now officially announced who has bought it out. Emergent Game Technologies revealed that the Korean-based company Gamebase has now acquired Emergent's assets including the rights to the Gamebryo game engine. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In the press release announcing the sale, Gamebase present JY Park states that the company plans to "focus on the company's roots - working closely with customers and providing excellent customer service." David Brame, the former vice-president of sales at Emergent, will become the company's new CEO. The new owners will have to work hard to get new customers to use Gamebryo as there is huge competition with Epic Games' Unreal Engine. Unity 3D and more.

The company behind the popular Gamebryo game engine and development tools has apparently been acquired but the buyer is something of a mystery at this point. Develop reports that Emergent Game Technologies was up for bids last week and now that bidding war has been won but that the company's asset liquidation group Gerbsman Partners has yet to reveal the name of the buyer. Details of the company's winning price have also not yet been revealed.

In November it was revealed that Emergent was up for sale but there was no word if any layoffs were planned. The Gamebryo engine has been used for a number of games, including Bethesda Softworks for titles like the recent Fallout: New Vegas.

It's been a bad past few weeks as game developers and companies have announced layoffs or even complete shut downs in operations. The latest such news comes from Emergent Game Technologies as its Gamebyro Lightspeed game engine is now up for sale. The engine has been used as the graphical basis for a number of well known PC games over the years. Most notably Bethesda Softworks used it as the basis for its last two Elder Scrolls games, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas.

According to Gamesindustry.biz (free registration required) the engine and its assets are being put up for sale by one of Emergent's investors, Venture Lending and Leasing V. In the online document that revealed the sale, it states that Emergent had finally managed to get a small profit in 2010 after several years of losses. It's unclear if Emergent will stay alive as a company if it sells off the Gamebryo assets.

Last March, Emergent Game Technologies seemed to be doing well for itself. The maker of the popular Gamebryo game graphics engine (used, among other games, for Fallout 3) had secured some new funding and launched a new product, Gamebryo Lightspeed. Now it appears there's a bit of a bump in the road as Develop reports that Emergent will restructure the company with some jobs lost as a result.

The number of jobs lost in the restructuring is currently not known. However, it does plan to continue development of Gamebryo Lightspeed with a spokesperson saying the restructuring will "actually provide greater resources to answer immediate tech needs, but also creates greater opportunities for Emergent to collaborate with development studios throughout the development process."

A few weeks ago, Emergent Game Technologies, the company that makes the Gamebryo game graphics engine, announced that it had secured $12.5 million in new funding and was going to introduce a new product soon. Today the company unveiled that product: Gamebryo LightSpeed. The new game development tech is so named because Emergent claims it will cut development time, and therefore costs, in making games for the PC and consoles.

Emergent says that Gamebryo LightSpeed will allow game developers to create a product from the prototype stage all the way to the finished gold masters. In their press release Emergent states, "Because prototypes created with Gamebryo LightSpeed are working models, companies will not need to start from ground zero when a publisher green lights their project." It also says changes to the game can be made and then the developer can 'watch the results in real-time, without recompiling." Gambryo LightSpeed will be shown at the Game Developers Conference to potential licensees late this month.

It's good to know that some companies are still able to raise some venture capital funding. This week Emergent Game Technologies announced that it had secured $12.5 million in new funding to continue to develop its middleware game development products, including its most famous product the Gamebryo game engine.

In addition to the new funding, Emergent revealed that it will announce a new product at GDC next month, saying only it will promise "development at the speed of light". Their Gamebryo game engine has been used in a large number of games including recent titles like Fallout 3 and Warhammer Online.

The new year is only a few days old and it's already spawned its first new independent game studio. That company happens to be Arizona-based Azo Studios, formed by three veteran game developers. One of the co-founders is Dave Eberly who was the chief architect behind the NetImmerse game engine that later evolved into the more advanced Gamebryo engine.

The company is short on details at this point on their plans, saying that they have plans to "develop video game titles and middleware solutions for console systems, personal computers, and handheld devices." It sound like they want to develop both games and game engines that can be licensed to third parties similar to developers like Epic Games, id Software, Crytek and Valve. It's already a crowded field in that regard so it will be interesting to see if Azo can make a run of it.

He's one of the most famous English language fictional characters of all time but he hasn't had much traction in the video/PC game space. That may soon change for Tarzan as a Italian developer named Twelve (yep that's what they call themselves) has announced it has secured the game rights to the character from the estate of Tarzan's originator Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Twelve will be using the Gamebryo graphics engine to handle their adaptation of Tarzan but beyond that the developer isn't saying much about how they will approach making a game out of the ape-man. They are currently looking for a publisher for their title. Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes was first published in 1912 and he went on to write 23 other Tarzan novels. The character has appeared in tons of movies, TV shows and other entertainment mediums over the past 100 years. We are personally fond of the Bo Derek-Miles O'Keefe movie version but that's just us.

Nvidia continues to hype up its support for the PhysX game physics software solution that Nvidia can now support via new drivers for its Geforce series of graphics chips. Today Nividia announced that future versions of Gamebryo, the game graphics engine developed by Emergent Game Technologies, will fully support the PhysX physics features.

Gamebryo is used in a number of previously released and future games including Bethesda Softworks's Fallout 3 and Mythic's upcoming MMO Warhammer Online. While it's too late for those games to intergrate the PhysX support, one of the first games that might use the PhysX features in Gamebryo is the recently announced RPG sequel Divinity 2 from developer Larian Studios.

NCsoft recently announced a deal with Epic Game to license their Unreal Engine 3 game development technology to help create a couple of unnamed MMO titles. However, it appears that NCsoft isn't going to be game engine agnostic, at least in the near future. It announced a few days ago it will also license the Gamebryo engine from Emergent Game Technologies for some other unnamed projects. Gamebryo has been used in a number of titles, most notably by Bethesda Softworks for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and the upcoming Fallout 3. NCsoft's most recently released game was Tabula Rasa; the publisher's upcoming titles include Aion and the ArenaNet developed Guild Wars 2.