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."