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For the past decade, many of the most pop video games take used a common physics engine — Havok. While it's had some competition from competing solutions, like Nvidia's PhysX, Havok has powered Call of Duty, the Assassin's Creed series, DOTA ii, and a number of Source-based titles, including One-half Life two and the Left 4 Dead franchise. Microsoft has now appear that information technology had acquired Havok from Intel for an undisclosed sum.

Equally part of the acquisition, Microsoft has agreed to continue licensing Havok to 3rd-parties and competitors, which could be important to the continued success of the middleware engine. Havok has long had a reputation for running on merely most every platform known to man, from game consoles to PCs and even smartphones. Microsoft also notes that "We will keep to innovate for the do good of development partners. Function of this innovation will include edifice the most complete cloud service, which we've merely started to show through games like Crackdown three." Havok has ever put a loftier priority behind supporting the latest family of consoles, every bit shown below.

Nosotros discussed Crackdown 3'due south use of remote rendering for multiplayer earlier this year. It'south the first time we've seen Microsoft really accept advantage of this characteristic, which was teased years agone, when the Xbox One start debuted. Buying Havok could mean that MS is serious well-nigh finding means to offload operations into the cloud, only game physics would seem an odd fit for that part. In gild to take an impact on gameplay, physics calculations need to occur at extremely low latency — lower, nosotros'd recall, than you tin reasonably wait if you attempt to offload them to servers halfway across the country.

While it's not talked about as much in tech circles, Havok also has seen some use in the defense industry, where it powers military simulations. The company signed a 2022 agreement with Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW) to license its software to the gainsay vehicle design firm and has a secondary site at HavokSimulation.com where it describes its collaboration with firms like Lockheed-Martin, Corys, Nova Technologies, and Kongsberg.

Kongsberg with Havok Ocean Simulator

Kongsberg with Havok Ocean Simulator

Microsoft's declaration that it wants to build boosted cloud services doesn't necessarily only mean gaming. It could besides refer to highly lucrative defense force contracts, which Microsoft might similar to convert to Azure customers. Cloud-centric support is key to many of Microsoft's future plans, and then acquiring a physics company with a proven engine could increase the kinds of contracts the software giant tin win.