Silicon Studio to release Xenko game engine commercially

Silcon Studio is to announce the first commercial release of its Xenko game engine at GDC 2017 next week.

The engine, which has been in beta for the past two years, during which time it has been open-source, will ship commercially in April 2017.

A modern C#-based game engine from the creators of Final Fantasy XV’s rendering middleware
Best known for its Yebis rendering middleware, used in titles like Final Fantasy XV and incorporated into Allegorithmic’s Substance tools, Silicon Studio has been working on Xenko since 2014.

It includes most of the key features you would expect in a modern 3D game engine and development environment, including a full asset pipeline, PBR materials, particles, scripting and a prefab system.

As you might expect, the rendering toolset looks particularly strong, with support for forward+ rendering, and a range of post effects including tonemapping, bloom, depth of field, lens flares and light streaks.

The engine is written in C# 6.0 – Silicon Studio is pitching it as the “only commercial engine that supports the latest C#” – and can deploy to Windows and Xbox One, and to iOS, Android and Linux via Xamarin.

Mac and PlayStation 4 support is “coming soon”.

According to its news release, Silicon Studio is targeting the commercial release of Xenko at the emerging VR market, although all of the “future proofing” features it namechecks (advanced rendering, Vulkan support, GI, 3D audio) are all also either present or imminent in rival engines like Unity and UE4.

Pricing and availability (Updated)
Xenko will be available commercially from April 2017.

Silicon Studio will be releasing pricing information “in the next few weeks” but say that Xenko will be priced “similarly to the competition” and will offer multiple licence tiers.

The engine will remain open source, but the commercial release will include extra features and support, and source code for the editor itself will be available at a “reasonable price”.

Read more about Xenko on Silicon Studio’s product website
(Includes link to download the current free beta)