Seems another (after Torque) prior competitor too Unity is now giving up …
EDIT:
instead of “giving up” maybe i should have said “changing business model”, because it’S currently total unclear wether they give up or what they do with existing codebase and customers …
Wow well, we’ll see what happens, can’t say too much on it just yet.
Cannot say that I am surprised.
hmm, they may just want restart fresh ^^… liquidation do not mean that they are just going to die…just a way to do a little reset sometime…wait and see…
Yes it might be a bit too early to draw conclusions.
But I think UT is the only commercial engine maker with sufficient funds. Not talking about ID, Valve, Epic etc, since they make also games.
Looking at C4, Leadwerks, Torque, Shiva, they apparently struggle a lot with making a significant impact in the commercial engine market. UT did it right with getting funded and building up the Asset Store. They have a healthy eco system around their engine with a huge community.
Just seeing how few videos about Shiva on YT exist compared to Unity… it’s pathetic.
Hope they land on their feet in case they can’t make it.
Unity is also, you know, useable.
coughtorquecough
Saw this coming from a mile away. They were supposed to release Shiva 2.0 early last year.
Geez there is a lot of misinformation in Unity’s community about Torque. Torque never gave up, they didn’t go bankrupt nor were they ever unprofitable. IAC (the company that owned torque, and owns websites such as ask.com and about.com) shut down Instant Action, the parent of torque. Torque at the time was profitable, but Instant Action wasn’t. Dozens of companies tried to buy the Torque assets, one of which did. Furthermore if you haven’t noticed Torque is still being developed and is currently open source. This post is not to say Torque is better than Unity just clearing up misinformation.
Very sorry to hear this. I never really looked deeper into ShiVa because they’re using LUA as scripting language - and that’s a language I just don’t like (and I am very happy with Unity, of course). But I think it’s healthy to have a few different engines available.
Visual3D is seems to be “still alive” even though they have been in Beta for “forever” and their forums aren’t particularly active:
Of course i know that Torque was open sourced … and activity is pretty dead as far i can see.
There’s no “misinformation” in my post … they gave up their business model…
You said they gave up competing with Unity. Which is entirely wrong. Changing to an open source model isn’t giving up particularly when they wanted to go open sourced before Unity even existed.
If Torque was profitable, why did they choose the open source route?
Thats new to me … proof of that ?
Well, their product wasn’t that good so…
I’m sorry I don’t think I understand your logic. If something isn’t profitable they go open source? Is that why RedHat makes over 1 billion USD on open source software? Regardless of your flawed logic garagegames actually makes more money since they’ve been open source.
Mark Frohnmayer (one of the original founders): When we first started, the original concept was to open source the engine, but we did the available source model to bootstrap the company. So glad to see GG finally take this step. Way to go Eric and team.
Torque went open source because their commercial business model failed. Not hard to understand.
Completely different from Red Hat, which sells mainly Linux distro’s to business clients since the beginning.
But who cares? Torque is a mess anyways 
A real shame, but not surprising. The software was pretty decent - albeit there were some strange design decisions and workflows - but their business model wasn’t sustainable. The software was probably capable of competing with Unity, but their marketing efforts weren’t. So they felt obliged to undercut Unity on price and make all platforms available at one price. That was only ever going to work if they could take huge numbers of clients away from Unity, and they didn’t.
Not trying to start an argument or debate the merits of one engine over another, but I would like to post a couple corrections in an effort to stop the conclusion jumping that’s happening. Full disclosure: I’m Mich Perry, lead developer for Torque 2D.
GG did not give up on Torque. Yes, the 2D and 3D engines were released as open source. However, GG has placed it’s two most experienced developers on each product to maintain and help drive the technology in collaboration with users. Each engine also got its own steering committee, which consists of the GG employees and hand-picked community members.
“GG released Torque OS because it was failing.” Not the case. The engines were still making money, but we started to come into our own identity. The new GG is not the same as the old one. Different owners, different team, different talents, and different goals. It’s not enough to get by. GG needs to grow, try new things, work on more innovative plans. Eric talks about this in his recent blog: http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/22218
“… and activity is pretty dead as far i can see.” That’s probably the biggest misconception. Both Torque 3D and Torque 2D have accelerated and improved more than any past endeavors. Every week there is a new blog about engine improvements. Hundreds of bugs have been fixes, many more docs and tutorials have been written, support for Oculus Rift is coming soon, Leap Motion is now supported, T2D received an architectural overhaul, and so much more. Going open source gave the developers freedom to improve the engine without red tape or traditional licensing restrictions.
If you were to scan my most recent blogs, you can see Torque 2D has moved faster than any other 2D engine out there in the past few months. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but it’s going to continue moving at a high velocity. I don’t even feel like I’m trying to create a product that competes with another engine. It’s not about making money with T2D. I’m just working on a fun game engine that is getting more powerful with each passing day, purely for the sake of making it better for everyone else to use.
On topic, it does not look like ShiVa is finished. They are in the exact same place Torque was in a couple years ago. The Torque team never went under, never stopped working. It just took time to find someone to pick us up and resume full operation. I hope no one at Stonetrip is in jeopardy of being out of work, because that’s a scary feeling. I truly hope for the best, for the sake of the people involved.
Shiva is FINISHED. There is no denying that. Their poor documentation, unintuitive interface, lack of response to community and repeated delayed release schedule doomed it. Torque is not much different - you guys can argue til cows come home Torque is still popular or whatever - the truth is NOBODY half serious will want to use Torque. Going open source is just dying a slower death. There will be hobbists using it with market share of less than insignificant and infinitesimal 1%, and that’s about it.
Unity is the only T-REX left in the room (not counting UDK of course). Leadwerks while is a good engine, won’t make much dent because of its lack of staff and fund to compete with Unity at any sort of meaningful level. Leadwerk is not even in the same class as Stonetrip in term of manpower or funds! So future looks bright for Unity. Its only real competition now is UDK.
You guys do realise that a lack of competition isn’t necessarily a good thing, right?
Ok, I won’t arguing over that point and believe what you say, since you’re apparently someone who works at GarageGames.
I can’t say much about how active Torque is. But I see barely any games made with it. Mostly I come across games, made with Unity these days. The last Torque game I’m aware of, was a neat looking tower defense game, some months ago. But that’s it. Even at Polycount there is no dedicated forum for Torque. But you have one for Unity, UDK and Cryengine. Unity is omnipresent.
But I agree with AngryPenguin. Unity’s monopol isn’t necessarily a good thing. Some healthy competition is always needed.