Click to enlarge

In an effort to expand their market scope, game engine developers Garage Games have recently updated the licensing options for their Torque Game Engine.

Garage Games had previously been marketing the engine at the indie game development market, selling engine licenses to developers who qualified as independant game designers - companies making less than half a million dollars annual income - for only $100 US.

While the price remains the same for indie developers under the new plan, larger game companies who don't fall under those requirements can now also license the game. At the price of $10,000 US up-front, and no back-end fees, the cost of licensing the Torque engine is still only a fraction of comparative game engine.

The Torque Game Engine was initally created by Garage Games to power their Tribes and Tribes 2 PC-only first person shooters, and was later developped into a fully-functioning, multi-platform game development tool. Featuring the very latest in game development technologies and offering a full complement of design tools, such as scripting tools, a particle engine, even a water engine, the Torque engine offers professional tools to game designers at a fraction of the cost of comparative design systems. On the Mac side, the Torque Engine is behind the recently-released Marble Blast as well as the upcoming action/arcade game Orbz, and the highly-anticipated Mac port of Garage Game's own MMORPG Realm Wars.

With any luck, marketing the engine at both the low and the high end of the market might increase the number of AAA-titles ported to the Mac. Through the use of their multi-platform design tools, porting games across the different platforms would theoretically be much easier and much cheaper for a game developper to accomplish in-house, rather than to have to hire out a third party studio.

Only time will tell. Stay tuned to IMG as more news regarding the Torque-based projects develops.

GarageGames (add to watch list)

GarageGames Opens Torque Website To Public

MGF: Marble Blast 1.0 Demo

Search for other Mac games news stories or browse our Mac Games News Archive.