Wwise

About Wwise

Audiokinetic stands as a pivotal software provider for the interactive media and video game industries, specializing in advanced audio solutions. The company was established in Montreal in 2000 by Martin H. Klein, a veteran of the music, film, and gaming sectors. Klein, who studied music at the Conservatory of Music - Trois-Rivieres and later law at the Université de Montréal, founded the company to address the technological gap in audio for the burgeoning video game industry, aiming to make sound an integral part of game design. The first commercial version of its flagship product, Wwise, was released in 2006, with Microsoft Game Studios being its first customer for the title 'Shadowrun'.

The company's core offering, Wwise (Wave Works Interactive Sound Engine), is a comprehensive audio middleware that includes an authoring tool and a cross-platform sound engine. It serves as a bridge between a game's engine (like Unity or Unreal Engine) and its audio assets, allowing sound designers and composers to create, manage, and implement complex, dynamic audio without deep coding knowledge. Key features include on-the-fly audio authoring, dynamic sound propagation, 3D spatial audio, interactive music systems, and a wide array of audio effects. This enables developers to create immersive soundscapes where audio responds in real-time to in-game events, player actions, and environmental changes. Audiokinetic's business model centers on licensing its Wwise software, offering various tiers from a free version for non-commercial and indie projects to paid Pro and Premium tiers for larger budget commercial games. This model ensures that the full feature set is available to all developers, regardless of budget size.

A significant milestone occurred in January 2019 when Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) acquired Audiokinetic, making it a wholly-owned subsidiary. The acquisition was aimed at adding Audiokinetic's audio engineering expertise to the PlayStation ecosystem. Despite the acquisition, Audiokinetic continues to operate independently, maintaining its platform-neutral approach by licensing its tools to developers across all platforms, including consoles, mobile, desktop, and AR/VR. This strategy is similar to Microsoft's acquisition and continued cross-platform support of Havok physics middleware. The company has expanded its reach with subsidiaries in Japan, China, and the Netherlands, and its technology is used in hundreds of titles shipped annually, from indie games to AAA blockbusters like 'Resident Evil', 'Assassin's Creed', and 'Overwatch'.