End of Support

As of March 2023, ShiVa Editor 1.x, ShiVa Editor 2.0, the associated ShiVa engines, exporters and online services have reached the end of their public customer support period. ShiVa Technologies SAS will no longer be releasing updates for these products, deliver bugfixes, maintain compatibility with current or upcoming 3rd party hard- and software or create security fixes. No new ShiVa sales will be accepted. Existing customers will be able to continue using ShiVa products without official manufacturer support until they have found suitable alternatives.

Dear ShiVa Developers,

when ShiVa3D was introduced to the world in the early 2000s, it was a real game changer: Never before has a game engine been so easy to use, ran on virtually every contemporary platform, and offered superior visuals while maintaining excellent performance. ShiVa was one of the first commercial 3D engines on the iPhone, opening the doors to the lucrative AppStore business to ordinary people who had never before coded for mobile devices. And with a click of a few buttons, the very same game would work on Android, MacOS, Palm, Web Browsers and even game consoles. ShiVa was used and loved by lone code warriors, Indie developers and even big corporations like Ubisoft. And they all came together in a big community which filled our developer forum with tens of thousands of posts, wrote knowledge base articles, recorded tutorial videos and made packages for our Asset Store.

Naturally, it would not take long until competitors entered the market, competitors with massive financial backing who could offer their services essentially for free. ShiVa with its one-time fee business model - no ads, no subscriptions, no royalties - was in serious danger. At this point, we had already beaten the average lifetime of software startup companies by several years, and seen the demise of several competitors like Torque or 3DGS, but we wanted to keep going. With declining ShiVa license sales, we did the only reasonable thing to keep the doors open: look for investors and major clients who could make good use of our technology while simultaneously advancing the editor. Many of you will have noticed that the number of ShiVa 2.0 beta releases has steadily decreased over the last few years. The reason behind this drop is that the team behind ShiVa has been contracted to work on projects for several industry-leading automotive, mechanical engineering and design companies. Unfortunately, none of this external work could be mainlined into the ShiVa 2.0 editor for our existing Indie customers.

To make a long story short, ShiVa struck a chord with one of our major clients, who will be requiring all our time and energy going forward. We think it is only fair to inform our remaining Indie customers that the public version of ShiVa will no longer receive any updates. Public customer support via e-mail, Slack, Skype or phone will be phased out in March 2023 and come to an end in April 2023. Existing Indie customers will be able to use our products as long as they see fit, but since we will not publish any platform updates, maintain the exporters or release security fixes, we strongly advise to look at some alternatives.

Possible alternatives

Depending on your game development needs, there are several viable alternatives to ShiVa for you to choose from. The most obvious choice would be Unity, ShiVa's closest and longest direct competitor. Cross-platform support is good to excellent, the editor is stable and versatile, performance could be better but the size of the community makes more than up for it. If you are running a small team with experienced developers, Unreal might just have what you need. The number of professional AAA titles released with this engine during its nearly 25 years on the market is truly astonishing, however, the learning curve is rather steep and even with a well-trained team, you will have your work cut out for you. As a final recommendation, we would like to mention Godot, which has had a meteoric rise from small hobby project to insider tip within a few short years. Although the performance in the current release is nothing to write home about, ShiVa veterans should quickly feel at home because of the similarly structured editor and the cross-platform design of everything. Version 4 should be a massive leap forward for the project, so keep an eye out for the release announcement. Godot is also entirely open source, which is something you might appreciate for future proofing.

Going forward

If you would like to continue working with ShiVa, we would strongly advise that you secure all the installers, sample packs, tutorials, API documentation documents, videos etc. you need from the ShiVa website, GitHub, YouTube (Channel-1, Channel-2, Channel-3) and other sources as soon as possible. We do not plan on hosting or maintaining accounts for any of these resources indefinitely. You can access a number of pre-packaged files from the menu in the top right corner. We are acutely aware that some people have built businesses around ShiVa and heavily rely on it working in the foreseeable future. If you are one of those power users, we will most likely have contacted you already or will send you a separate e-mail in the coming days. For all of March, please feel free to contact us through our Slack Channel if you need assistance with licensing.

A heartfelt Thank You

ShiVa has been the center of our lives for nearly 20 years now. We have worked hard on our technology, but without the support of our community, ShiVa would never have become a success. We cannot thank all of you enough, especially those who stood by us through the more difficult times, who were patient with our infrequent releases and provided valuable feedback during the beta stages. We are proud of what we have achieved together. But all good things must come to an end eventually. We hope you understand our motivations, as much as we hope that you will find a good alternative engine and editor for your future endeavours.

 

We wish you all the best,
The ShiVa Development & Support Team