For those who haven't followed for 11 years, Garage Games started off selling the Torque engine for $100 - full stop, no tiered licensing schemes, making them at the time the cheapest game engine on the market.
The engine itself came from that venerable and dated Tribes 2, which was a commercial flop, and when the studio went under the tech rights when to GG. I'm not sure if GG was a third-party or more of an ex-employee spinoff.
In any case, I've been doing amateur game dev since around that time, and Torque has always struck me as a highly troubled product. They were offering $100 licenses to a 100% C++ codebase, which attracted all kinds of dreamers who really had no realistic hope of hacking on a C++ engine. I imagine their support load was immense.
I'm surprised they've survived this long - at $100 a pop you wouldn't expect the cash flow to be great. But kudos to them for open sourcing this.
Tribes 2 was not a commercial flop, it did extremely well for a 2001 game.
The studio (Dynamix) did not "go under", they were closed by Sierra/Vivendi for "restructuring", which was a shock considering the success of Tribes 2. In fact, the next game (Tribes: Vengeance) was green-lighted due to in large part the success of Tribes 2.
GarageGames was partly made up of some ex-Dynamix employees.
And that's all too frequently how successful studios are rewarded in the post-2000s mega-conglomo AAA game industry: shuttered up and their "resources" (programmers, designers, etc.) distributed to polish turds on the parent company's other big projects.
Dynamix was closed 4 days after Torque(then called V12) v1.0 was released. GarageGames itself was more of an ex-employee spin-off (created several months before the closure) to sell a game engine using the Tribes 2 tech.
For those who haven't followed for 11 years, Garage Games started off selling the Torque engine for $100 - full stop, no tiered licensing schemes, making them at the time the cheapest game engine on the market.
The engine itself came from that venerable and dated Tribes 2, which was a commercial flop, and when the studio went under the tech rights when to GG. I'm not sure if GG was a third-party or more of an ex-employee spinoff.
In any case, I've been doing amateur game dev since around that time, and Torque has always struck me as a highly troubled product. They were offering $100 licenses to a 100% C++ codebase, which attracted all kinds of dreamers who really had no realistic hope of hacking on a C++ engine. I imagine their support load was immense.
I'm surprised they've survived this long - at $100 a pop you wouldn't expect the cash flow to be great. But kudos to them for open sourcing this.