Most of you have probably heard by that Konami is most likely going to stop making big budget games aside from PES. I would even go as far as to say that most people here expected this to happen sooner rather than later. I know I certainly did.

But since the release of MGSV I've been wondering what would become of the FOX engine. It seems to me like that engine is very good and Kojima Productions most likely spent a large amount of time and Konami's resources to make it.

Can anyone who knows more about this stuff explain to me how it could actually be sensical for Konami to keep it for themselves and only use it to make more PES games? I know other publishers have locked down various engines over the years (Recent example include the Frostbite engine for EA and idtech for Bethesda.) but at least those engines are being used to power more than 1 game.

In short, wouldn't it be much better for Konami in a financial sense to license this engine out to other developers? And if not, why? Bad return on investment? Is the engine market extremely competitive and cutthroat?

I'd love to hear some thoughts on this.

I do hope it'll have a future beyond Konami's assembly line of PES, because an engine that can run a (admittedly segmented and somewhat barren) open world at 1080p60 even on consoles deserves to be able to spread its wings!

PES is going open world!

It'll make the most open world pachinko machine ever.

It's going to just die.

If Konami were rational it would license/support the engine (if there's demand) and license out its IPs for new games (or at least compilations of its great old games.)

But it seems like there's some executive there who is invested in cutting any real connection to big console games and focusing on exploiting their IPs among people who don't really know them (You know who cares about Silent Hill? Hardcore gamers. To everyone else it's just a couple very bad horror movies.)

I think they won't license Fox because they don't care about gaming, and by the time they decide to go back into console games, IF they do, it will be outdated.

Other possibility is that wherever Kojima sets up shop next buys the Fox engine from Konami for him to use, but I see that as unlikely.

Unless Konami specifically intended to use the FOX engine for licensing, I doubt we'll see it used outside of any close Konami relationship. Most big developers already use their own proprietary engine and smaller studios usually don't have the budget to afford something like this. Even if they went the UE4 route and let smaller developers license it cheap but took royalties instead, we still don't know how complex FOX actually is to program for. Kojima Productions made good use of it, but it's no surprise since they designed it. But would it make sense to anyone else? UE4 was at least designed with the intention that others outside Epic would perhaps use it.

All in all, considering how Konami is cutting back on the big budget games, FOX just seems like a bad investment.

Probably will never be used again, but they should try to licensed to other developers, it looks like to be a very good engine. Also I never heard of a Japanese developer licensing engines before, so I would be very surprised if they did. One of the examples of that is what are the engines that Nintendo uses? I always wanted to see how they make Mario and Zelda games, but Japanese developers seldom show how their games are made.

@vsharres: Nintendo likely uses an in-house developed engine that they'll probably never show to the public or other developers.

On topic, it'll probably just die. Which is a fucking shame since it's an amazing engine.

Doesn't PES use the fox engine?

Unless they license it out to other people, it probably wont have a future.

Open world PES with fultoning and Mother Base building.

Build the perfect team. A team without a nation.

There probably will be some MGS spinoffs and maybe DLC who knows. Konami certainly aint gonna license it and its probably very bad suited for that kinda stuff anyway, its a one purpose engine. Maybe that PT game was intended to use Fox Engine but its history.

Has any Metal Gear Solid engine been used for anything but the MGS they where made for?

@theht: now that is a soccer game I'd maybe play, can they have like cool soccer superpowers like fireball kick or somethin'?

As for the Fox engine I'm afraid it's going to die, I really don't see konami licensing it at all.

I've never seen a Japanese company license out a graphics engine but who knows at this point. In one sense, it would be easy money, but then they would also need to have a team there to work on it and help developers with it. I guess it all comes down to numbers, which is clearly Konami's only interest at this point (to be fair, that applies to most companies too.)

Otherwise, it's all PES, and who knows how long that will even last. This whole thing is a fucking shame.

I doubt Konami would bother having a team to support Fox engine, especially after seeing the "engine overseer" depart the company this week.

They'll get a few years out of the engine for their one remaining console game (PES) and then quietly take it out behind one of their pachinko parlours or health clubs and shoot it in the middle of its face.

Yeah, The Fox Engine is amazing, but I'm sure that we will getting other great amazing engines and stuff in the coming year/years. All that this tech does is make me extra happy about where things are going for the future of games. If you have ever seen the demo video of someone building an MGSV environment it is completely amazing.

People seem to have some kind of emotional attachment towards the Fox Engine which is baffling to me, the hundreds Kojima Productions developers are far more important than the tech behind game whose skills could be lost for good.

This is completely tangential, but seeing fox engine stuff reminds me of the cryengine demo videos i saw prior to crysis' release and it makes me jones for another game as far ahead of its time and high end pc humbling as crysis was in 2007. It's great how only now i'm able to play it maxed out with a consistently high framerate.

Fox engine looks damn good and it's nice how scaleable it is, but i feel like it isn't terribly mind blowing. I'd say it's probably got a lock on best lighting effects at least.

Konami is definitely full of sense.

I'm sure they'll do something useful with it, they've been making a lot of smart decisions with regards to AAA game development lately.

@thepanzini: Yeah, because the internet seems super thrilled about KojiPro being axed. Like, what was the point of your comment?

I was talking with somebody on a message board about why the Fox Engine does what it does, and he geeked out pretty hard over it. He basically told me that it gets away with doing what it does because all of the models are fairly low poly, but that the lighting techniques and shaders give it all a high poly sense of depth. He went into great detail about the lighting and shaders, but I couldn't follow most of it. I thought it was a pretty clever solution, personally, and I'm surprised that more companies don't follow that kind of set up. It seems like the Fox Engine is the first current gen engine to account for the limitations of the new consoles, and uses them to its advantage.

It's a goddamn shame Konami won't ever use it after PES. Their technology director, Julien Marceron or something french like that, recently quit the company. According to him Konami has no plans for future titles and has nothing in development for home consoles. It's frustrating, because after PT and MGSV, the future looked so damn bright.

The FOX engine is dead. Shame; it's beautiful.

Hah, what a neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerd

Stoke City have just signed Pyramid Head. As for Konami not using it, if their priorities lie elsewhere, fair enough. The engine should be a feather in their cap rather than something to go to waste. Although, whilst it looks amazing I wonder how easy that tech is to use. Konami could make a bundle as an engine house IF it's accessible enough for developers to use.

Licensing really isn't viable unless you build the engine with licensing in mind. In order to license out the Fox engine Konami would have to either strip out all the middleware they used and sell it as an incomplete product (not viable) or redevelop every system that relies on middleware (also not really viable given that they have taken some losses on the engine development team.)

The third alternative is that they basically could only license it out to other major publishers that could afford all the various sublicenses for the middleware used by the engine. However these publishers already generally have at least one custom built in house engine to suit their various needs, and probably don't need to shell out for something that will almost certainly be completely unsupported by Konami.

When Epic decided to make the source code for UE4 available to everyone they had to buy up a fair number of companies just to avoid the problems with middleware licenses. Konami isn't about to do that.

Yeah, it's a shame people can't be concerned about multiple things. Maybe one day science or evolution will find a way to enable the human brain to store more than one thought...

I noticed this while playing and it's extremely fucking clever. Some times it's more noticeable like with Snake's normal arm in the chopper. But my mind was truly blown when I played the C2W Subsistence mission and Snake had no gear on him, he was actually super square'y and low polygon at times. But the weapons, lightning, blur and art-style hides it super well.

@onemanarmyy: Thanks for that info. Man that is so sad though. After all the time and effort that went into it.

If a pachinko machine can run it, I bet that's the only place we'll be seeing it again.

Good breakdown @onemanarmy. All the talk was that this was going to be the next gen engine for Konami games and uhh.... like @mooseymcman says here get ready for an open world pachinko game.

So i don't think i actually know what a pachinko machine is. How much game is there to a pachinko machine? From the wikipedia page it sounds like a Peggle machine that plays a random clip depending on where your balls end up.

I wonder what they could have done with Phantom Pain's look if it was 30fps on console. Probably just a handful more environmental pieces I suppose.

Licensing out an engine comes with a whole lot more baggage than just, "here other developer, here's the code!" For people to be able to use engines like Unreal there have to be pages and pages of documentation of how it works, tools to use it with, and end-user support guys for when it goes wrong or inevitably doesn't do what you want it to.

Sure, it seems crazy to go to all that trouble to make your own in-house engine and then scrap it immediately, but that's what happens when business people change roles and suddenly different projects are given different levels of support.

Also, just because one good game came out on an engine, doesn't mean that engine is god's gift to videogames. It could be completely inflexible and specialised to do exactly what MGS:V needed to do and nothing else. Maybe continuing to use it would just have cost even more money.

The lighting is great and the way that light and glare interacts with different materials is fantastic. Most, if not all, of Snake's outfits have multiple materials layered and it makes it looks amazing. The actual models themselves are pretty iffy, the draw distance is sort of garbage (I CAN SEE THAT OUTPOST HOW COME THERE ARE NO GUARDS IN IT YET COME ON), and shadows only draw a few hundred feet in front of you. I get that it's a concession to consoles but I'd love to be able to crank all of that stuff up. My computer can handle more detailed shadows and extra character models and still push 60, so let me do that.

It's kind of funny that games that look amazing but have high system requirements (remember people shitting their pants about VRAM requirements last year?) get shit all over, but MGS's PC port gets universal praise, even though it's clearly constrained by last gen consoles in what it can handle.

They should absolutely allow this stuff for licensing, they're leaving money on the table otherwise.

However, I do wonder if the FOX engine would be any good for other games? The way Kojima and his team operate I bet things would be coded with their crazy game in mind and nothing else. Maybe there's an entire pooping animal feature set in the engine. or something, which wouldn't translate well into a new RPG.