Epic acquires RAD Game Tools
The history of RAD is a history of media read speeds - playing back full-motion video from a CD on a PS2 with its near-zero available CPU resources was a superhuman effort.So low-overhead (fast) decompression is essential for AAA titles. But recently I guess developers think disks are fast enough now, because PC games have been using more uncompressed assets to free up CPU time, massively bloating install size. Current-gen consoles also all have NVMe SSDs.Given this trend, RAD's heyday was definitely in the days before consoles had NVMe disks (Bink in particular let games punch far above their weight) so this might be a nice forever-home.Blame Intel for not making faster CPUs, and consumers for tolerating massive install sizes, i guess.The other angle to this story is that the PS5 has a hardware decode unit for RAD Kraken. To get the best use out of the PS5 hardware, it's essential that the encoder is still made available. This is a huge competitive moat. (PCs probably won't get a comparable decompression accelerator card and such a card wouldn't get enough market penetration anyway.)