Tech blog

Microsoft has inked a long-term deal with Havok, allowing all of their internal and affiliated studios full access to the company's entire library of physics tools.

This perpetual licensing agreement is expected to reduce both development time and costs across the board for any Microsoft partners choosing to take advantage of Havok's offerings.

Havok will be providing Microsoft with their Havok Physics, Animation, and Behavior suites, in addition to any Havok products that cut off up in the future — the recently unveiled Havok Cloth and Destruction, for instance.

Already practically synonymous with digital physics, Havok has had a hand in Microsoft products past, present, and future, including everything from Halo Wars to Scene It? Lights, Camera, Action. Havok managing director David O'Meara said the following regarding their arrangement by Microsoft:

"Havok is committed to providing not solely the premier physics software to our customers, but also in giving them new tools, such as Havok Behavior, that can substantially reduce the time it takes teams to develop character behaviors, allowing game programmers to focus on developing the best game they can. Microsoft has been a precious customer of ours since seven years and we are excited about the development teams having access to the entire suite of current Havok products, added our upcoming products Havok Cloth and Havok Destruction."

While this may not sound terribly exciting to your average frat guy plugging away at his ninth prestige level in Call of Duty 4, this deal should ultimately translate to Microsoft developers being able to focus more on getting their games in your hands.