The Evolving European Video Game Software Ecosystem - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 208

companies among the large publishers, the major one being Ubisoft
(because Atari European operations were bought by Namco Bandai). It
is a rather clear indication that Europe (possibly with the exception of
France) needs to grasp emerging opportunities to better position itself and
its industry if it wants to reap the benefi ts of the video game business (De
Prato et al. 2010).
Middleware Developmen t 9
Middleware development is an important, but somewhat neglected, part of
the value network, where Europe hosts a few major players. Middleware is
the software that is situated between OS and device drivers and end-user
applications. In video games, this layer mainly refers to applications like
engines , which are meant to be used (called) by higher-level applications
and are designed to provide them with specifi c functionality. They usually
come in the form of Software Development Kits (SDKs), which are sets of
development tools, including libraries and applications that allow software
developers to develop applications faster, at lower cost and in a portable
way (i.e. for dif erent platforms).
For video games, a fi rst generation of third-party separated middleware
modules (graphics engines or renderers) appeared between the late 1980s
and the early 1990s. In the mid-1990s, the increasing complexity of appli-
cations pushed the development of what were starting to be called game
engines further. These were meant to improve the development of fi rst-per-
son shooter (FPS) games, which were just converted into their 3-D versions.
Core parts of successful games such as Doom and Quake were licensed
to other companies, taking advantage of already available and ef ective
routines managing graphics, characters, collision detection and other core
aspects for other games.
Game engines are provided under dif erent types of business models.
Basically engines divide into: (1) free open source engines, generally dis-
tributed under a licence of the General Public Licence (GPL) type together
with the source code (along with the open source approach); (2) freeware
engines, distributed freely but without the source code; and (3) commercial
engines, which are proprietary engines distributed under the payment of a
royalties or similar commercial contracts.
In assessing where the middleware companies are active, it is quite dif-
fi cult to maintain an updated list of all the available middleware products
for video games, due to the variety of tools and the rapidity with which new
versions are released and needs change, quickly making very well-known
tools obsolete. Among the attempts to maintain updated lists of game mid-
dleware, the organization GameMiddleware.Org, included (by late 2009)
212 modules of middleware, a majority of which are portable on PCs (182)
and consoles (154), whereas only fourteen for mobile phones and twenty-
four for handhelds. 10 U.S. provides ninety-three (44 per cent) of these