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One thing that RenderWare had going for it (and shown briefly in the video) was the detailed documentation. Other engines barely had any documentation (i think the most brutal was id Tech - if you bought an id Tech license all you'd get was a day with Carmack to ask him questions :-P) and the programmers were largely left alone to figure out things themselves or rely on whatever modders managed to find online.
But AFAIK RenderWare wasn't exactly a full game engine like Unity, Unreal, etc as much as, like Gamebryo (another highly popular engine at its time with apparently 400+ titles using it), it was a "game engine engine" - ie. a toolkit to make your own engine and game-specific tools.
Also one thing that probably made it less desirable in later years was that it was written in C with its own dynamic object system (someone i know who worked with it described as stringly typed :-P) that made things a bit fragile. Being in C most likely helped it during the PS2 era when C++ compilers weren't as good, but by the mid-2000s pretty much all AAA engines used C++ and RenderWare probably felt like a dinosaur.
Normally called a "framework" these days.
At the time too :-P, but i think most people who aren't much into programming will get a better picture with something like "an engine for engines" than a "framework" :-)
Kind of interesting how RenderWare started out as a professional simulation tool and shifted to games, since Unity and Epic are both trying to expand their tools outside of games nowadays. We've truly come full circle.
Didn't expect that to turn into "how EA ruined a thing" story. Kinda sad, some bit of extra competition in engine space wouldn't be bad
Chris Chapman makes some excellent videos on Game History and events that most other websites/channels don't usually cover.
Here's playlist of his work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSosgD1KwxY&list=PLzMrknbZxTcnDJZPIaO4A_l_au9wMxDEc&index=17
RenderWare really was EVERYWHERE. Funny though this didn't mention the first RenderWare game, Rocket Jockey.
/edit: Oh shit, maybe I'm wrong? Wikipedia says it was released about two weeks after Criterion's own Scorched Planet. So the first third party game, then.
it seems like the persona 4 golden on PC that was just released is a straight port so it coudl be using renderware as well
how interesting
straight port of the vita version though which might or might not use rednerware
yea i said "could"
atlus never really said which engine p4g ports was using