Have you seen an uptick in usage since introducing the new model? If so, by how much? We’ve seen a signal that this new model has made Havok technology more approachable for mid-sized developers, despite being announced only a few months ago, particularly with developers using Unreal Engine. Since Havok provides ready-to-use plug-ins for Unreal, there’s no barrier to trying out Havok technology even later in development.
What are the advantages of implementing Havok if you are a smaller scale developer? In simple terms, the Havok features used by leading game-of-the- year candidates are now also available to smaller professional studios. They’re also benefiting from our extensive research and development efforts and collaborations with major AAA titles, meaning the products are constantly refined through this feedback loop. Developers get to leverage battle-tested technology that they can confidently make part of their core gameplay systems. We offer seamless integrations with Unreal Engine, where our technology can help developers build differentiated experiences through an extended feature set and highly scalable performance.
How did you come to the conclusion that a $50,000 per-title fee for a lower budget studio would be ideal? What was the logic there? When more ambitious game projects need a performance boost, more options to fine-tune behaviour, or the flexibility to build complex gameplay systems on top of core systems, that’s where Havok can make a real difference to the success of a game and increase its reach to a broader set of platforms. There’s a large diversity of team sizes across the industry, and the product depth and price won’t fit every team. Still, we’re confident that there are many teams where spending a very small fraction of their dev budget to access transformative industry-leading technology will be a great choice. A per-title fee makes licensing easy and straightforward for studios and allows them to use Havok in only a subset of their project portfolio if they choose to do so.
Why is it not one flat fee for all studios, rather than the higher rate that comes up if you do have a bigger budget? Havok is a core-mission-critical technology, and bigger-budget game titles typically want a closer engagement with Havok and more source access, consultancy, and support, both onsite and remote. The flat fee for AAA studios is at a higher level to reflect the investment on the Havok side and the value that our products add to those titles.
As I’ve alluded to earlier, for studios with budgets of over $20 million, pricing is variable. What does a negotiation with a company at that scale of budget typically involve? Regardless of team size, we don’t charge a royalty or a percentage of development cost. We understand that modern game development is not one-size-fits-all, so our business model does have some tiers, but pricing within a tier is transparent and predictable. So it’s less about negotiation but more about educating new studios on the transformative impact of Havok tech on the costs, performance and
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gameplay of a title. We understand that modern game development is not one-size-fits-all and have developed robust and easy processes that help us navigate these complexities quickly.
What are the big priorities at Havok at the minute? What are the areas in which you’d like to grow or make even more changes going forward? Our goal is to provide game developers with technology that empowers them to differentiate their games. For a very long time, graphics have been the area that separated high-budget productions from the rest. Today, technology like Unreal Engine has democratised graphics, and as a result, we’re seeing more teams trying to push the limits in other areas. We’re focusing on providing the building blocks for developers to efficiently build differentiating gameplay systems in a way that doesn’t add to the cost of building the game. For example, the Havok Balloons demo was set up using the Niagara plug-in in Unreal Engine in the same way as any other particle system is set up. The only additional step to get the behaviour shown in this demo is to tick a box that enables Havok Physics for the particle systems.
What is the action plan at Havok for making those changes happen sooner rather than later? We have a proven way of developing our products that we have applied for the last 25 years. While many Havok features come from our own research and development, the key to building game technology is working with a wide range of game developers from the early stages of production. This allows us to develop and iterate on our technology as part of and under the constraints of a real production. We’ll continue with this approach to build Havok Physics, Navigation and Cloth.
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