Pricing strategy of a physics engine (Meqon testcase)

[Erwin Coumans]

This 2004 document has still some interesting considerations about physics engines for games. In particular the pricing of Meqon, with respect to other solutions like in-house development, free (ODE), cheap (Torque), affordable (Novodex), high end (Renderware, Havok, Hypermatter). The market has changed, with Ageia giving away their PhysX (Novodex/Meqon) for free.

http://www.continuousphysics.com/ftp/pu ... exjobb.pdf



Enjoy,
Erwin

[SteveBaker]

The market has changed, with Ageia giving away their PhysX (Novodex/Meqon) for free.

So do you think PhysX is being given away in the hope that this will generate sales of the PhysX hardware? That seems like something of a desperation measure. It's hard to imagine many gamers buying that thing in the face of nVidia and ATI's support for GPU physics.

[jacmoe]

<edit> Realised that I shouldn't try and teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Erwin did indeed port PhysX to the PS3.. </edit>

[Erwin Coumans]

Ageia is *not* giving it all away for free!

They just made a very smart move.
PhysFx is free if you develop on the PC - all other platforms are "non-free".

Since the major players wouldn't release for the PC only, Ageia is going to sell a lot anyway.

The free PC license is a great idea, because it attracts a lot of indies/hobbyist/smaller studios.

Closed source and proprietary Ageia PhysX is free on Playstation 3, and if you support their hardware it's free for any platform: Ageia is hoping to make money of their PPU hardware, not with their software. But NVidia and ATI's GPU's are much more powerful then the PPU.

The free PC license is a great idea, because it attracts a lot of indies/hobbyist/smaller studios

It seems to be more desperation and it's not such a great idea at all: it is mostly targetted to take away those indies/hobbyist/smaller studios from open source engines like ODE and Bullet.

[Etherton]

It sure strikes a devastating blow to all middleware developers. It looks more an act of desperation to attract attention before Ati and Nvidia GPU/Stream processors become mainstream among all middleware developers.
In no way a smart move that will increase the market penetration of dedicated physics only PPU, it will only gain the sympathy of the hobbyist and the indie developer.

Sure you will see lots of new demos and wrappers from Ogre, Irrlitch, Torque, GameStudio, OpenScenegraph, and many other free and inexpensive graphic engines.
It is not clear if the consumers of these game engines are making mega buster games that will motivate the end users of these games and demos to go out and buy dedicated hardware to play faster physics.