End of The Road for Stingray

Stingray was the engine created by the talented engineers from a company called Fatshark. They’ve used this technology called Bitsquid for a number of projects, but later sold it to Autodesk. The corporation rebranded the software and promoted it as Stingray. It got some traction and was used by a number of small and big game studios, plus it had some great VR features, but we’ve never witnessed the overall adoption we’ve seen with Unity or UE4. We were actually wondering what happened to Stingray and if we ever see it grow to a bigger product. It appears, that this is not going to happen.

Autodesk officially announced that Stingray will no longer be sold as a separate product. Beginning January 8, 2018, users will be unable to renew or purchase new licenses. Stingray functionality will be included in 3DS Max and Maya LT. The software will “no longer be developed”, which doesn’t sound very good.

Why is Autodesk discontinuing new releases of Stingray?

Our customers are increasingly standardizing on two game engines, Unity and Unreal Engine for both games and VR/AR authoring. Both engines have built extensive content and resource ecosystems for developers to leverage. We feel we can better serve our customers by working more closely with Unity and Unreal Engine rather than trying to develop our own alternative.

To this end we recently announced a partnership with Unity Technologies to improve workflow between our products. We will continue to invest in building better, more interactive authoring tools for both games and design visualization but will be pursuing stronger partnerships with third party game engine developers rather than building our own engine.

Some key highlights: 

• As of January 7, 2018, subscribers will no longer be able to purchase or renew Autodesk Stingray subscription.

• When their current subscription expires, they will no longer be able to use the software.

• Autodesk will no longer develop Autodesk Stingray as a separate product but will continue to include Stingray functionality as part of Maya LT and 3ds Max (3ds Max Interactive).

• Games previously shipped with the Stingray engine will not be affected by these changes.

If you want to learn more about the production of Stingray, check out our interview with the developers, who used the money from the sale to finance the development of Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide.