LAS VEGAS -- Representatives from Insomniac, Epic Games and Ubisoft gathered at the DICE Summit on Friday afternoon to discuss the question of whether it's wiser for developers to build their own game tech or to buy middleware instead.
Developers who prefer to go the middleware route say that it allows them to reduce the risk and cost of creating games while speeding up the development process. Those on the opposite side of the debate argues that using someone else's technology actually increases the risk that a game will run into unexpected costs and potentially devastating delays.
Mike Acton and Andy Burke from Insomniac clearly feel strongly that it's in a company's best interests to build, not buy. Acton took the stage first to argue passionately against buying middleware. He began by explaining that "people say a lot of things about why they should use engine middleware," such as that it allows them to concentrate more on their core gameplay.
"That's a complete crock of shit," said Acton, who argued that what happens far more often is that instead of concentrating on the core gameplay, "you end up concentrating on figuring out how to use someone else's tech."
Using middleware also isn't the savings that many believe it to be, said Acton. It comes with hidden costs, such as the cost of delays if the tech doesn't quite do what you need it to and the cost of missed opportunities on platforms that don't get a great deal of support for that particular middleware.
Creating your own tech comes with a price, of course, but ultimately, the control it provides is well worth it."Who will be blamed if your game sucks?" asked Acton. "You will, because it's your responsibility to get a good game out."
Burke echoed Acton's comments, though he seemed to take a more practical view. Developers often purchase middleware hoping it will just drop in and perfectly suit their needs, he explained. "The problem is that off the shelf things never just drop in. It will always take far more investment than you think it will," he said.
He advised attendees considering buying middleware to think about how much work it will take them to get the technology to work the way they need it to. "In the end, it's your ship date that matters," said Burke.
Mike Capps, unsurprisingly, came out to support the use of middleware. His company, Epic Games, licenses its Unreal engine to countless developers, including Activision, BioWare, Atari, and Midway. Taking the stage after Insomniac's passionate argument against buying tech, Capps joked "I'm clearly never going to license middleware again."
Standing in front of a slide that cheekily proclaimed "Licensing middleware is totally awesome!" Capps described the many ways in which middleware can make a developer's job easier. Cost is part of it -- "You can license tech for less than it costs to build"-- but more importantly, a developer that uses middleware can "just write to a spec and let the middle ware do the legwork," instead of worrying about how to code for different platforms.
Letting a purchased engine do the heavy lifting also gives developers the freedom to get started on the content immediately, "and we all know that in next-gen, content is king."
Capps also argued that middleware such as the Unreal engine, which has already been used time and again by a host of different companies in a wide variety of games, has been "battle tested" in a way that a company's in-house tech simply never could be.
Insomniac argued against middleware and Epic argued in favor, but Ubisoft's Yannis Mallat came down somewhere in the middle. Though he commented that "Generic tools do not allow creative ideas to be implemented. At best, they allow for generic ideas," Mallat said that tech isn't the real issue in game development, content was.
Developers should worry less about the tech and more about how "to innovate and provide emotion for the players." Mallat's message seemed to be that the tools a developer uses are ultimately not as important as the product those tools create.
