Unity, Unreal, you've got company! Havok throw their hat into the mobile toolset market in a big way!

Well, this one came out of left field… well, that or GDC, but it’s easily the biggest news yet for mobile game developers.

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Havok, the makers of the popular Havok physics engine, the Vision 3D game engine and much much more, just announced Project Anarchy.

 

What exactly is that?  Well, I’ll let them describe it.  From Havok.com.

 

At the 2013 Game Developers Conference today, Havok™ unveiled Project Anarchy, a complete end-to-end mobile 3D game production engine. Havok announced that developing and releasing a game with the technology will be free on many leading mobile platforms, without commercial restrictions on company size or revenue.

Project Anarchy will include Havok’s Vision Engine together with access to Havok’s industry-leading suite of Physics, Animation and AI tools as used in cutting-edge franchises such as Skyrim™, Halo, Assassin’s Creed®, Uncharted and Skylanders. The free download will also include a broad range of game samples and tutorials to help the mobile development community hit the ground running. Havok will be giving open previews of the technology on the main show floor throughout GDC.

As part of this initiative, Havok will launch an online community to proactively promote and support developers through all stages of production via a dedicated website www.projectanarchy.com. Project Anarchy will also encourage free sharing and collaborative development of extensions and customizations by the community.

“We’re consistently blown away by what the AAA industry creates with our technology,” said Ross O’Dwyer, Head of Developer Relations at Havok. “We’re really delighted to be able to offer these professional grade tools to mobile developers for free and we look forward to supporting the mobile game development community to make some stunning games with the technology over the next few years.”

 

The site Project Anarchy is just an email sign up page for now.  For the record, submitting your email address will get you no additional information at the moment.

 

So then, what exactly does this mean?  From the sounds of it, they will be “giving away??” mobile versions of Vision Engine, their Physics Engine, Animation Software and their AI package.

 

The number of commercial product’s that have used these products is almost too high to count.  I don’t really get the finanicals of this deal, all we have to go on is:

will be free on many leading mobile platforms, without commercial restrictions on company size or revenue

I don’t really see any gotcha words in that sentence, other than maybe “on many leading”.  I don’t really understand how Havok makes money in this scenario, except maybe for upsetting people on non-mobile versions?  I will post more details as I get them.

ProjectAnarchy launches later this spring.


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