Today Epic Games announced on their official website that Square Enix have a signed a long term license agreement allowing them access to Unreal Engine 4 technology for use in future titles. The news should not come as a surprise to anyone considering Square Enix first licensed the Unreal Engine 3 back in 2007 and then proceeded to re-license it again last year.
This time round however it grants Square Enix access to Unreal Engine 3 and the new Unreal Engine 4 technology which is interesting because they already showed off their own impressive Luminous Studio Engine at E3 so you’d think they would just roll with that instead. Off the top of my head I don’t recall Square Enix ever doing all that much with the Unreal Engine 3 outside of 2008′s The Last Remnant and a couple of other titles including Demons’ Score, a mobile game of all things.
Perhaps the plan is to use the Luminous Studio Engine on the larger budget titles whilst the Unreal Engine would be used for some of it’s smaller scale projects, not that Unreal Engine 4 screams small scale by all means. We’ll have to wait and see which of the two engines Square Enix decide to use when they finally get round to rendering some of those “HD Towns“
Epic games has released the following statement regarding Square Enix’s decision to continue using the Unreal Engine for the foreseeable future.
“Epic has a strong relationship with Square Enix, and it’s an honor to provide their creative and technical talent with the best game technology available for licensing,” said Taka Kawasaki, territory manager of Epic Games Japan. “We look forward to supporting their developers with world-class tools for years to come.”
