Bandai Namco has been working on its own game engine for more than two years, but the games on it will have to wait a long time

Bandai Namco Entertainment has revealed that a new in-house game engine has been in production for two years now, indicating that the company is committed to ending its reliance on third-party engines. This is becoming increasingly rare at a time when fully featured and supported engines such as Unity and Unreal exist, making game development much faster and easier on the cost.

Bandai Namco director Katsusuke Horiuchi confirmed this in an interview with Automation Media. "The reason for in-house production is that we want to continue to have the technological capability to build a solid foundation ourselves, instead of leaving the foundation to game engines made by other companies." Bandai Namco having its own engine will eventually pay for itself as it avoids the licensing fees for Unity or Unreal, and it can even license the engine for use by other studios if it wants to. But some developers prefer to keep their developments to themselves, as Rockstar does with its RAGE engine.

Don't expect the new engine to be announced for any games for at least another year as it's not finished yet. There aren't really any games that use the engine in development yet, so if fans are hoping to get a new Souls game that uses the engine, be prepared to wait a bit. This just goes to show how difficult it can be to build a new modern engine and why most developers just use an existing engine for their projects.

The upcoming Elden Ring game from Bandai Namco and FromSoftware uses the company's old engine, which has been repurposed for an open world game and still makes the characters and environments look fantastic.

A source: Automation modes