Ageia has actually changed the PhysX license and now all PC games commercial or otherwise can use the PhysX engine without having to pay royalties (source). That much I know for certain, however I've heard that this doesn't extend to the Xbox 360 but does to the Playstation 3 the reason being Sony paid Ageia bucket loads of money to make PhysX free for all developers.

At least thats what I've heard, but strictly speaking, is it possible to develop a commercial title (for Xbox Live Arcade for instance) using PhysX? I've only read on forums that it's free on the Playstation 3 though that doesn't do indie developers much good...

Inide developers have 2 ways onto the 360

1. XNA Framework - though you can't sell anything on there. No PhysX becuase games need to be 100% managed.

2. Through an Xbox publishing agreement. Once you have one of these you can ask Microsoft and PhysX the question becuase you must have bucketloads of cash and signed agreements for support. Anyone under one of these agreements is unlikley to answer questions in here due to the contracts and NDAs etc.

You might try asking inthe PhysX forums since this is really about their license agreement.

Just found this: http://devsupport.ageia.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=1949

Free:

• Commercial & non-commercial use on PC
  • Must keep registration information currect
  • Must agree to the EULA at the time of download (pops up, but is copied below)
  • Available for Windows & Linux (soon)
  • No PhysX HW support requirement
• PS3 platform (through Sony pre-purchase)
• All platforms through some of our middleware partnerships, such as UE3, Gamebryo 2.2, and others

$50k per platform:

• Xbox 360
• Fee may be waived at our discretion for multi-platform developers providing PC HW support
• Fee may be waived at our discretion for some Tools & Middleware providers

 

Just kind of odd how Sony have paid the licensing fees for developers and Microsoft hasn't, I mean $0K is a lot of money to pay per title...

Well don't forget that its not free to be a licensed PS3 (or Xbox 360) developer. So Its not really costing $0 to you as a developer as Sony have to recoup their prepayment that money somewhere along the line.

Is this Odd? Depends on your point of view - lets say sony charge an extra $100 for each dev kit as a result, or maybe they take an extra 1% of your net profit - if you choose not to use PhysX you just paid the fee anyway. On a multi million dollar game this isn't a big thing but its not odd its just 2 different ways of handling the economics of the situation.

Yeah I guess that makes sense enough, though a $100 isn't much considering it saves $50,000 for those who opt to use PhysX.

Think about economics here... though its nice to get things for free how does Ageia as a company keep going if they give everything away.

It looks right now with the PC announcement that like the graphics card people they want to make their money off the hardware and my giving the API away it will encourage game developers to use their API which will hopefully encourage more people to buy the hardware.

So possibly to make extra income (and becuase console users cannot buy a card to upgrade their console) they have chosen to charge on the consoles. Sony decided to cover everyone up front, MS didn't. Maybe if future versions of consoles have PhysX chips (licensed of course from Ageia) built in then the API will be free on there too.

I think as a PC developer you are getting a stunning deal...

my $100 was a random number, I have no idea what a PS3 dev kit costs nor how sony will recop their fee... if instead they take 1% of the profit think what that would be on a million selling title...

The ZMan:

Think about economics here... though its nice to get things for free how does Ageia as a company keep going if they give everything away.

It looks right now with the PC announcement that like the graphics card people they want to make their money off the hardware and my giving the API away it will encourage game developers to use their API which will hopefully encourage more people to buy the hardware.

So possibly to make extra income (and becuase console users cannot buy a card to upgrade their console) they have chosen to charge on the consoles. Sony decided to cover everyone up front, MS didn't. Maybe if future versions of consoles have PhysX chips (licensed of course from Ageia) built in then the API will be free on there too.

I think as a PC developer you are getting a stunning deal...

I think this is more a matter of perspective. Ageis aren't a stupid company, and their free license deal has quite a few strings that if you don't honour will really bite you in the butt later.
The reason it's free for Playstation 3 developers who have already forked out £50k for their development kit & SDK, is simply because the PhsyX PPU is part of the PS3 hardware. So Ageis make money on every console sold, so the more developers who can add physics for free will, making more gamers want to play these amazing physics based games, meaning more PS3 sales and more money in the pockets of Ageis.

Hardware physics is more than encouraged by limiting or stripping out features that could've easily been done via Software. The performance increase also while not unusual because of using the hardware, is actually greater than it should be. Basically they deliberately cap the software physics, so people will thing "oh man this is slow, maybe I should get a PhsyX PPU" and with titles like Cellfactor showing off what can be done without actually being sold but a freaking technology demo. Well I bet that hasn't hurt hardware sales either. Quite a few underhanded tactics to steal business away from Havok and Renderware who also support hardware physics via Shaders. (so no need to purchase fairly expensive hardware)

This isn't helped by the alluring factor of costs if this hardware solution is supported, to Ageis specifications (and believe me they check every damn step of the way before allowing you to continue). In the end it's just not worth bothering with.
If you want a free Phsyics engine, then use ODE, Newton Game Dynamics, or MonkeyPhysics.

Otherwise Renderware:Physics and Havok are possibly the best professional solutions.
I think both Ageis and Sony have made big gambles recently, honestly don't see them seeing the big pay-off from it they were hoping for.

I'm not sure what you mean by saying there are strings attached, from a business perspective what limitations does PhysX present that ODE doesn't? Also technically speaking isn't the PhysX engine optimized to use the PPU but will operate fine without a PPU provided youare not using features the PPU recquires, even in this stripped down situation wouldn't PhysX be better than ODE? Especially with the developer support Ageia is providing PhysX developers.

Like yous aid, Ageia is in it to make money, they profit from its sales on the ps3, how I thinkt hey are planning on making money on the PC is by getting as many titles as possible to run using PhysX, inevitably it will sell more and more PPUs. It's a win-win situation, particularly if PhysX is not as advanced or easy to use as Havok (though near its capabilities) by making the licensing free and recouping losses via the selling of the PPU they can effectively compete with other big players.

There might be something i'm not seeing here, though, is there a catch 22 somewhere in the licensing?

the PhsyX PPU is part of the PS3 hardware

No, it's not. They ported the PhysX code to run on the Cell.

The difference between PhysX and ODE is:
- With ODE, you get the source code, and can do pretty much whatever you want with it (BSD license).
- With PhysX, you get the SDK, but their runtime software (that contains all the juicy bits) is a binary distribution, and you have to adhere to their licensing requirements.

PhysX is a great bit of technology, it's been well-performing and stable when I've used it, so if you're OK with their platform and licensing choices, you can't go wrong.

Btw: paying $50k for PhysX for XBOX 360 is quite reasonable. Compare the effort it would be to create your own physics engine from scratch -- one engineer for 6 months will cost you $50k, and won't create anything nearly as complete or robust.