Jason Hall on engine licensing

More and more developers are licensing other companies' game engines these days rather than developing their own from scratch, and one of the most popular at the moment is the LithTech engine. Monolith's CEO, Jason Hall, has explained in an interview just why engine licensing is becoming so common, and unsurprisingly it all comes down to money and the relationship between publisher and developer...

"A custom job from the ground up by a company that builds a technology for a game is horrendously expensive to do. If you're going to build an engine that's going to compete with LithTech, and not make any mistakes at all, it's going to take you at least two years, a million and a half or two million bucks, just to get to where we are right now."

"Then they start making a game. So now you're up to five million bucks, and publishers don't want to pay for that, that's for damn sure. And developers, where are they going to get that kind of money? If a publisher advances you five million dollars, you know how may copies you have to sell based on the royalty rates to make any money? It's ridiculous."