March 4th, 2010 @ Sway Bar, London
UK studios converge to battle over who's the cleverest - have you booked your place yet?
Thursday April 22nd, 2009 @ The Brewery, London
The countdown to the MCV Awards 2010 has begun – with date, venue and categories announced.
July 14th, 2010 @ The Hilton Metropole, Brighton
The Develop Industry Excellence Awards is the only event which rewards the work done by Europe’s leading games development companies.
Develop's essential countdown concludes
Develop's two-week run down of the top ten game engines concludes today, with Epic's Unreal Engine 3 taking the number one spot.
The full top ten is as follows.
No.10: Torque 3D
No.9: Vicious Engine 2
No.8: Bigworld Technology Suite
No.7: Vision Engine 7.5
No.6: Infernal Engine
No.5: BlitzTech
No.4: Unity 3D
No.3: CryENGINE 3
No.2: Gamebryo Lightspeed
No.1: Unreal Engine 3
To read our guide to the top 10, and to help you decide which to choose for your next project, click here.
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doesn't Id still license their engine and isn't it used in some top level games ?
I can't think of any games that are using it, except for id games.
What about SOURCE? HL2, L4d, etc..
Slow news week huh?
By which criteria has this list been cobbled together?
Sales? Number of different titles using said engine? Ease of use? Cost?
Don't forget id's engine was used for Quake Wars which technically isn't an id game. There are many open source games using the id tech.
I think a top 10 list like this silly without some sort of ranking criteria. Or is it not a ranking, but just a listing of 10 engines? A survey of AAA game engines that doesn't include id Tech, Source, and HERO seems a little suspect, but again what is the criteria? If it's "quality shipped titles" you'd have to give the nod to Unreal.
It's not bizarre at all.
Firstly, all lists are subjective - remember that. But also, we write about these companies, the teams that invented them and/or talk to their users enough to have a fairly good grasp on whether a) the engine is any good, b) how popular it is, c) how innovative it is, d) what it's featureset is like, e) as Brett points out, quality of shipped titles, etc etc.
Secondly, the feature is clearly designed as a look at the engines **available to other developers**, not 'who has the best engine'. If that was the case, maybe Nintendo could have 'won' given that Wii Sports Resort looks so nice for that hardware's limitations, or Infinity Ward's tech, or Team Ninja's.
Thirdly, any such feature looking at third party engines has to take into account not just the prestige of its creator but the context of the moment. So to people crying out for id and Source, I ask: are they really viable concerns in the context of third-party tools? Yes, they have powered some great games, but their main users are still their owners. After years of availability they haven't really garnered the kind of reputation others have.
(Sure, Terminal Reality's Infernal Engine is on there - but with the Ghostbusters game just out and it only just on the market, we're giving it the benefit of the doubt. If it fails to catch on outside of its studio and we do this list in the next year or the year after, they probably won't be on there.)
So in total, if you're shopping around for an engine for your first project or your studio's next then we are confident that one of the ten listed are best for your needs, whatever it may be.
This is a really great top ten list, thanks for putting it together. Unreal Engine 3 looks incredible. Anyone can post their own list to our site toptentopten.com. The coolest feature is you can let other people vote on the rankings of your list.
