Well done to the people in Irish gaming software company Havok, according to Techcrunch, they’ve been snapped up by Intel. This follows the March aquisition of Irish gaming middleware company DemonWare by Activision. Well done all. Nice to see Ireland doing so well in the gaming industry.
Damien Mulley
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Surely doing well is buying other companies rather than getting bought out yourself?
In fairness SK, a games company that focuses on this small technical niche is hardly going to go around acquiring other companies, but I agree with you in the sense that being bought out is not necessarily a sign of the company doing well. I’ve been stunned by Havok’s success many times over the past few years – blown away by the realism of the ragdoll physics in some new game, and then I see the “Havok” logo on the box.
Sometimes you have to be bought out so that you can acquire enough capital to do something else that interests you.
Yes, I’m not convinced buyouts are all that great a sign… I’m not sure that there are any independent games industry companies left, besides mobile phone people.
[…] SteveBallmer wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptWell done to the people in Irish gaming software company Havok, according to Techcrunch, they’ve been snapped up by Intel. This follows the March aquisition of Irish gaming middleware company DemonWare by Activision. Well done all. … […]
I’m in lazy mode, so I’ll start by quoting my self from ENN…
“Three years ago, games publisher EA obtained British developer Criterion along with the firm’s RenderWare middleware arm — RenderWare were Havok’s main competition, but have been seen as just an arm of EA ever since.”
The Intel statement on the deal at diffrent points says that Havok will “continue to operate as an independent business” and that “Havok will operate its business as usual, which will allow them to continue developing products that are offered across all platforms in the industry”…
‘All platforms’ suggests consoles which run on IBM chips, but it remains to be seen if they go down the RenderWare road, or not, or even if they are restricted at all by Intel.
It’ll be a bad thing for the industry if they are, and will also likely damage the games middleware section of the games industry as more developers will have less faith in outsourcing tools etc and go back to doing everything in-house.
Intel’s motives could be, in part, as simple as giving them the edge in the gaming/other physics hardware market by linking it in with Havok’s software.
(I know I’m ranting when my comment is three times as long as the post)