Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 licensed by Square Enix

Monday 29 Jan 2007

Square Enix recently announced a licensing agreement with Epic Games enabling Square Enix to utilise Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 middleware in its next-generation game development process.

Square Enix’s successful franchises (including Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and Kingdom Hearts) have been achieved through the company’s proprietary technologies, which were mostly optimized for each game given the limited resources of game consoles. To ensure game quality and development efficiency for the next-gen consoles, as well as PCs and network titles, Square Enix is now building a technology platform which will be used throughout the company, making use of proprietary technologies and now using third party solutions such as Unreal Engine 3.

Technology platform for game development becoming more important than ever

“The complexity of next-generation game systems featuring HD graphics and multi-core parallel processing poses a number of technological challenges to our game development. 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,” said Taku Murata, General Manager of the Research and Development Division of Square Enix. “The technology platform for game development is becoming more important than ever. I’m excited to be partnering with Epic Games in such an important area.”

“We’re extremely excited to be working with Square Enix,” said Jay Wilbur, Vice President, Epic Games, Inc. “Square Enix is one of the biggest and most influential companies in the world-wide game business, and having them work with Unreal Engine 3 is a major honor for us and something we’re very proud to be announcing.”