On December 20, Star Wars: The Old Republic, was released.  The Old Republic is the first major game release using the HeroEngine.  This enginewas designed with huge multiplayer scalable games such as the Star Wars MMO in mind.  BioWare made its decision to build this complex, large scale game on the HeroEngine foundation because of its superior, integrated offering of development tools that provide live collaborative development and real-time updates, dramatically streamlining the process of building online games.

When Idea Fabrik Plc  acquired the technology from Simutronics in 2010, Alex Shalash, Idea Fabrik’s Chairman and co-founder saw a great opportunity to bring innovation in both technology and services to the broader online game development space.  Shalash said, “We saw HeroEngine as a very powerful toolset where through some changes in technology and additions of complementary services we could provide a new business model for smaller game studios in both the MMO and Social Game markets.” 

In a matter of months, Idea Fabrik launched the “HeroCloud” service developed to provide continuously updated HeroEngine technology in combination with a new service layer designed for the needs of medium and smaller game studios.  HeroCloud also supports developers post-launch with hosting and bandwidth as well as global billing and marketing solutions. HeroCloud is free to use for developers, and applies a revenue sharing model upon game launch.

There are already thousands of developers using HeroCloud and according to President and COO Neil Harris, “Developers are seeing a significantly reduced time to market.  The Star Wars MMO was a major, multi-year undertaking, but other MMO games have shipped on our platform in as little as 15 months.”