Sony Interactive Entertainment announced a rather surprising move today—they will be acquiring Audiokinetic, the makers of Wwise, an audio middleware platform that is widely used by developers in their games.

The surprising thing here is that Sony is investing in middleware at all—this is an area they have largely stayed out of (outside of the Phyre Engine, which they made back in the PS3 era as a cross platform engine). Presumably, their interest in Audiokinetic is because of VR, where strong audio design and technology can be crucial.

Interestingly enough, Sony and Audiokinetic both confirmed in the press release announcing the acquisition that Audiokinetic will continue offering Wwise to all developers and platform holders, including non-PlayStation ones. Which is smart, of course—middleware only has value if it is an industry standard, and even Microsoft continues to license out Havoc in spite of acquiring it earlier this generation.

“A rich and all-encompassing audio experience is increasingly critical to the overall gameplay experience, further enhancing immersion and emotion for the player,” said John Kodera, president and CEO of SIE. “Audiokinetic is a preeminent provider of audio solutions for the gaming industry, and we are confident that this acquisition will allow us to further grow the PlayStation platform and contribute to the broader gaming industry. It’s our goal to support Audiokinetic’s efforts to advance its audio technology while maintaining independence and platform neutrality.”

“Joining the SIE family is a win for both Audiokinetic and our partners who use our audio tools and middleware,” Audiokinectic CEO Martin H. Klein said. “We will remain independent and continue to deliver our suite of audio solutions to developers and platform holders, with even greater resources to continue innovating, expanding our market and enhancing our technology. We are also excited about the opportunity to contribute to SIE at a platform level.”

It’ll be interesting to see how Sony handles Audiokinetic, and what use its talents are put to.

GamingBolt had a chance to speak to Audiokinetic senior sales representative Mike Drummelsmith, whose company has worked on the video game audio development middleware Wwise, used in numerous popular titles. This time, we asked Drummelsmith about the Xbox One’s eSRAM and it’s impact on the development of Wwise tools.

Though the PS4 and Xbox One are very similar in their architecture – both featuring custom AMD CPUs and GPUs – they are distinct in that the former uses 8 GB GDDR5 unified RAM and the latter uses eSRAM. Some developers have pointed out issues with the eSRAM and it’s even been called out for resulting in a lower resolution for some games. What was Drummelsmith’s take on its effects for Wwise?

“As with any new hardware, there are always funky complexities and quirks to work around. Luckily in this particular situation, it hasn’t affected us. As I mentioned above, having the extra audio processor on the Xbox One has had both benefits and detriments for us, but we’ve worked through them.

“Last generation, the situation was reversed, and we had to work hard through the complexity of the PS3. Comparatively, this generation has been much easier to work with. From our perspective on the audio side, the two systems are pretty much the same, though we get the secondary output on PS4 (playing sounds through the controller, like in Resogun), which is a pretty neat feature.”

Thoughts or disagreements? Let us know in the comments.

Though Microsoft has made Kinect an option for Xbox One consumers, no longer bundling the motion camera with the console, an extraordinary amount of work went into its design. This was further facilitated by the extensive improvements made to voice recognition and sound. In fact, the Xbox One features an on-board audio processor to help in this regard while the PS4 doesn’t. But does that really result in limitations to the latter as a result?

GamingBolt had a chance to speak to Audiokinetic senior sales representative Mike Drummelsmith, which created the Wwise middleware. On being asked about the lack of an on-board audio processor for the PS4 and whether it resulted in limitations, Drummelsmith replied, “Not really. Having extra hardware is nice, since it makes some things ‘free’ from a performance standpoint. However, extra hardware can also add complexity into the mix that makes it more difficult to diagnose issues and maintain full control over your audio pipeline.

“As soon as you hand off something to a dedicated processor and say ‘do something with this’, you’re pretty much bound to whatever that processor does! Both Xbox One and PS4 have each presented their own challenges and benefits, but we’re nicely on top of each (and we have a ton of current-gen games in development, running the gamut from small indies to massive AAA titles).”

What are your thoughts on the same? Let us know in the comments.