Slipspace Engine for third party developers?

Games Halo Infinite
1

With all the work being put into it I was wondering if the Slipspace Engine is being built as an exclusive in-house engine for the Halo Franchise or is it planned that it can be used by third-party AAA and Indie developers as well?

The official website states “Intuitive and powerful tools let fresh creators and industry veterans focus on bringing worlds vividly to life.”, which suggests it could be an “easy to get into” engine but otherwise mainly concentrates on Halo and doesn’t contain much info about it at the moment.

From what has been shown so far it looks like SSEngine could become a serious competitor in the next-gen engine market next to Unreal 4 and Unity which makes me excited.

Also what sales cut would Microsoft be planning to take from developers deciding on using their engine? (it’s 5% for UE4)

2

Assuming it will be heavily optimised for the Xbox platform - so MS would be keen for other developers to use it and promote the platform.

Free for developers to use as long as it is for Xbox exclusives?

3

> 2585548714655118;2:
> Assuming it will be heavily optimised for the Xbox platform - so MS would be keen for other developers to use it and promote the platform.
>
> Free for developers to use as long as it is for Xbox exclusives?

With Microsoft’s stance on more openness with the Xbox platform lately and seeing how Slipspace/Infinite is also coming to the PC possibly via multiple stores as MCC PC already indicates I don’t think they would go that route. What I could see however is removing the cut on any sale that took place on the console, giving a better incentive for developers to develop for the console but they aren’t completely restricted to it. Maybe do the same for sales on the MS PC Store.

4

I would be quite happy with that, and I hope they do go with a similar model as UE4, Unity and many other lesser known engines out there.

I do have quite a few ideas I’d like to test out, which would be nice to do in a “Halo” engine.

How they’d handle it though, I can’t say.

5

I can see them allowing others to benefit from the new engine. Makes sense all round really :slight_smile:

6

> 2585548714655118;2:
> Assuming it will be heavily optimised for the Xbox platform - so MS would be keen for other developers to use it and promote the platform.
>
> Free for developers to use as long as it is for Xbox exclusives?

They seem to be moving away from Xbox exclusives, and we already know Halo Infinite is not exclusive, it’s going to PC too. I’m not sure if the engine will be available to other devs, time will tell.

7

I guess we’ll have to see what kind if engine it is first. If it’s an all around engine like Unity or Unreal I could see Microsoft licensing it out but it could be something specifically designed for Halo systems in which case they wouldn’t. At the very least if they wouldn’t license it I could see them letting their other studios use it if they wanted to.