The developers of God of War: Chains of Olympus and Daxter have decided to make the plunge and enter the middleware business with the release of their very own PSP, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 engine. Say wha?

Ready at Dawn claims that the engine will cater to specific console development needs and cut the need for additiona technology, so they say. President Didier Malenfant of Ready at Dawn Studios states,

"At Ready At Dawn Studios, we are faced with the challenges of making a great game everyday. We are building something for developers who are tired of the challenges of PC engines shoe-horned into consoles, or trying to stitch together layers upon layers of middleware from multiple vendors. Our solution will be a complete game development platform that simply works."

That is some tough talk, if you ask me. If you guys haven't taken notice of what they did with the God of War game on the PSP, you're seriously missing out on one of the best - if not the best - handheld graphics you'll see this gen, thus far. I'm not going to knock what Malenfant says simply because I am well aware of what Ready at Dawn is capable of producing, as per their resume. To compete with the numerous tools available out there, like the Unreal Engine for example, is going to be quite a task. But if they can manage to simplify and create a consistent middleware engine for console devs, then I'm pretty sure that things will be golden. No one has seen what the engine is capable of as of yet, but here's hoping it's something far more improved than what's been available so far.