Game Engines are the foundation in which games are built, the contain all the logic to be able to show graphics, play audio, compute input etc without having any of the game specific assets such as sprites or music files.
Middleware on the other hand has one specific goal in mind, for example an audio middleware just plays sounds and you would not be able to display graphics with it.
So you can think of game engines as the combination of middleware.
There are two types of game engines based on who developed them or rather who has access to them:
This really depends on the engine, it could have been anywhere between a licensing fee per game sold or a one time fee of thousands of dollars for console games.
This was due to the limited audience of game engines at the time, you would have to pay an entire development team to work on a game engine (not cheap) and you would only be able to sell to about a dozen companies.
However with the Indie game revolution a number of free or cheap game engines became available but tended still to charge much more for console development.
Although game engines can be used across multiple games consoles or platforms, we have separated the game engines by platform to make it easier to compare the features between engines of a given console generation.
| Platform Name | Game Engine List |
|---|---|
| Microsoft Xbox | Original Xbox Game Engines |
| Nintendo Wii U | Wii U eShop Game Engines Unity Game Engine Games on Wii U eShop Wii U Nintendo Web Framework |
Read all about Unity Game Engine Games on wiiU eShop in this s...
