Epic acquires RAD Game Tools – including Oodle Kraken compression

Today Epic Games announced that it was acquiring veteran tools maker RAD Game Tools. The deal has been made for an undisclosed sum.

RAD Game Tools remains best known for its Bink video compression format, which has been popular with game developers for 20 years now. More important today though are its Oodle and Telemetry products.

Oodle is a data compression tool, providing faster data loading. Its Kraken codec was specifically mentioned in the PS5 deep dive, with Sony’s new hardware natively supporting the codec for data compression, most important when steaming in massive amounts of texture data.

Telemetry meanwhile is a performance visualisation tool, which looks to provide easily understandable information about your code to allow for troubleshooting and optimisation.

“We know first-hand how impressive RAD’s compression technology is, having used it to improve the load time and quality of our most popular games – including Fortnite. The RAD team includes some of the world’s leading compression, video and game dev tooling experts, and we are thrilled to welcome them to the Epic family,” said Kim Libreri, CTO of Epic Games.

While RAD Game Tools CEO, Jeff Roberts, noted how long the working relationship has already existed: “Our work with Epic goes back decades, and joining forces is a natural next step given our alignment on products, mission, and culture. We both believe that solid technologies enable developers to build beautiful, performant, and reliable experiences. We’re excited and humbled to join the amazing Epic team.”

The deal certainly makes sense, after all, Epic already uses RAD’s compression technology in Fortnite, and making it a formal part of Unreal Engine is a good idea. The company will continue to work with other clients across various sectors. Epic acquires RAD Game Tools