“Three years ago, games publisher EA obtained British developer Criterion along with the firm’s RenderWare middleware arm — RenderWare were Havok’s main competition, but have been seen as just an arm of EA ever since.”

The Intel statement on the deal at diffrent points says that Havok will “continue to operate as an independent business” and that “Havok will operate its business as usual, which will allow them to continue developing products that are offered across all platforms in the industry”…

‘All platforms’ suggests consoles which run on IBM chips, but it remains to be seen if they go down the RenderWare road, or not, or even if they are restricted at all by Intel.

It’ll be a bad thing for the industry if they are, and will also likely damage the games middleware section of the games industry as more developers will have less faith in outsourcing tools etc and go back to doing everything in-house.

Intel’s motives could be, in part, as simple as giving them the edge in the gaming/other physics hardware market by linking it in with Havok’s software.