Epic Games’ affably combative vice president Mark Rein is getting hot under the collar, but it’s not the competition itself; it’s the idea that Epic has nothing to worry about.  “It kills me when people say we have no competition,” he says. “There are lots of different engines people use to make games. Lots of people use Gamebryo. Lots of people use their own engines.”

Still, the question that kick-started this exchange was relatively anodyne; just along the lines that with German developer Crytek starting to offer its CryEngine 2 commercially, the engine market was going to get more interesting. Maybe Crytek’s entrance would keep Epic and its market-leading Unreal Engine 3 on its toes.

“I probably get a little defensive when people say we don’t have any competition,” Rein ponders some moments later. “We certainly don’t think that. If we had no competition why aren’t half the games using Unreal?”

But that’s probably what most industry outsiders do think. Unreal Engine 3 has been the success story of the middleware market for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC. (There’s no support for Wii yet, and probably won’t be for a while, if ever.) As well as dozens of developers such as Gearbox, Silicon Knights and Realtime Worlds, most of the big global publishers, such as EA, Sony, Microsoft, NCsoft, Midway, Capcom, Square Enix, Activision, Ubisoft and THQ, also have site-wide licences to use the technology as well.

Yet for all its success, Epic remains a peculiar example of a middleware company. Few other vendors also create games alongside technology. Equally, only a handful of game developers have proved organised enough to be able to offer support and all the other secondary requirements needed to make in-house technology commercially available. However, Rein says it’s only the combination of being a game developer and an engine company that has allowed Epic to flourish.

“The middleware market’s a tough market,” he says. “I don’t think we could survive as a middleware-only company.” What’s even more surprising about Epic is that despite being only 80 people strong, it doesn’t demarcate between those people working on games like Gears Of War and Unreal Tournament III and those supporting external clients using Unreal Engine 3.

“All the developers on the game projects support the engine,” Rein explains. “That’s what licensees want. They want to talk to someone who’s actually making a game with the technology when they have questions about how to make a game with it.

“If you have a question about physics, James Golding will answer your question. If it’s about rendering Andrew Scheidecker or Tim Sweeney will answer your question. And if you had a question about design, maybe Cliffy would answer your question. That’s the only way to do it. That’s why we’re successful. It’s not just a coincidence.”

The situation’s very different over at Crytek. Relative new boys into the middleware scene, the company’s only just sold the first licence for its CryEngine 2. Previously it had sold some licences of its Far Cry engine, but development director Harald Seeley says that was a learning process.

“We weren’t ready to go into the licensing business with Far Cry,” he explains. “We were too young and too small a company. We didn’t know what it would take to make our engine work in different types of games.”

Like Rein, he also emphasises the importance of support though, even if Crytek is taking a different approach. “Having learned from the experience of Far Cry, we know it [support] will take a very experienced team,” Seeley says. “We can bring new people in, but they will have to deal with the learning curve before they can take over the reins, so in the short term, we’ll have to take some of our best people out of production.”

Less surprisingly, Seeley’s keen to stress the differences between CryEngine 2 and Unreal Engine 3.

“I think we’re targeting different markets. They are targeting wide, we are targeting deep,” he explains. “We’re looking for the client who wants their product to stand out from the crowd. Unfortunately, the more successful Unreal becomes, the more level that playing field becomes, and easier it becomes to get lost in the crowd, because what do you have that the next client doesn’t have? That’s why we developed our own engine. We had to stand out from the competition.”

In order to ensure the teams who license CryEngine 2 don’t suffer from the same problems, Seeley says, Crytek will be highly selective about who gets their hands on the technology.

“We’re not being real aggressive about it,” he says, referring to the commercial rollout. “We want people to take their time and make sure it’s the right tool for them. We’re going to pick the right people to work with. Not every studio will benefit from CryEngine 2. It takes a lot of talent to make a tree look that good. And it’s not just about the engine. It’s about dedication and artistic vision too.”

Of course, taking an overall view of the entire engine market, it’s a much more complex place than a head-to-head deathmatch between Epic and Crytek. Long-term players such as Emergent with its Gamebryo engine and Touchdown’s Jupiter engine compete too, and then there’s the likes of Trinigy, Vicious and Instinct, plus PC-only technologies such as id’s Doom 3 engine and Valve’s Source. Indeed, at present the CryEngine 2 only supports PC although work is continuing on other platforms, and no one yet has an optimised PlayStation 3 version of their technology.

Nevertheless, Crytek’s commercial launch of CryEngine 2 is significant; two of the world’s best developers are now actively licensing their technology. Of course, nobody knows how the competition between the two will work out in the future, but pure technology players without the gravitas of in-house game development will certainly find it harder.