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In my opinion, the WWISE 3D audio support is top notch. And you can even license my headphone virtualization as a plugin which - of course I'm biased - sounds a

In my opinion, the WWISE 3D audio support is top notch. And you can even license my headphone virtualization as a plugin which - of course I'm biased - sounds awesome! It's just that nowadays, less and less people play with sound at all. Mobile games? Sound doesn't matter. Switch? Sound matters very little. Xbox/PS5? 99% chance you'll use stereo TV speakers anyway. So the remaining 0.1% of us who have a surround setup connected to a gaming PC have been optimized out of the market. There just isn't enough ROI for gaming companies to spend resources at pleasing 1 out of 1000 players with 3D sound.

Guillaume86 5y ago
The fact that most bluetooth headsets/buds have too much latency for gaming/video probably contributed a bit to that state of affairs.
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  At least with video playback you can compensate by delaying the image, with gaming that would drastically hurt the user experience.
adanto6840 5y ago
Speaking from a developer-manager & developer-experience point of view, using Wwise was awful for us -- it remains one of the worst decisions we made on our debut game release. I'm sure it's great for larger studios/shops or for AAA budget titles, but it was a nightmare for our small team. Stuff like rare crashes on certain semi-obscure hardware, where the crash dumps clearly indicated issues deep within the Wwise (native code) stack, were extremely difficult (or impossible) to debug. Wwise provides zero support for their base licensing fee, you have to pay for service on top of licensing to get any support at all. Their Unity "SDK" / user-land code was awful, too, and basically had to be 80% rewritten to be usable at the most moderate level of scale. That's more of a gripe, working with their native side more directly wasn't that bad -- and they've perhaps improved their default C#/user-land code since then. Another grip is that WWISE devs/designers/engineers are expensive, and making any change requires firing up their application. Overall, the entire experience was poor, especially since we paid for the privilege. My advice would be that you can't seriously consider WWISE for your project unless you have an audio engineer on staff and intend to keep them on staff for the duration of your project (plus a year or two for support). TLDR: IMO Wwise may be a solid product, but only for projects with a minimum budget of approximately 7 figures.

Guillaume86 5y ago

The fact that most bluetooth headsets/buds have too much latency for gaming/video probably contributed a bit to that state of affairs.

HideousKojima 5y ago
At least with video playback you can compensate by delaying the image, with gaming that would drastically hurt the user experience.

adanto6840 5y ago

Speaking from a developer-manager & developer-experience point of view, using Wwise was awful for us -- it remains one of the worst decisions we made on our debut game release. I'm sure it's great for larger studios/shops or for AAA budget titles, but it was a nightmare for our small team. Stuff like rare crashes on certain semi-obscure hardware, where the crash dumps clearly indicated issues deep within the Wwise (native code) stack, were extremely difficult (or impossible) to debug. Wwise provides zero support for their base licensing fee, you have to pay for service on top of licensing to get any support at all. Their Unity "SDK" / user-land code was awful, too, and basically had to be 80% rewritten to be usable at the most moderate level of scale. That's more of a gripe, working with their native side more directly wasn't that bad -- and they've perhaps improved their default C#/user-land code since then. Another grip is that WWISE devs/designers/engineers are expensive, and making any change requires firing up their application. Overall, the entire experience was poor, especially since we paid for the privilege. My advice would be that you can't seriously consider WWISE for your project unless you have an audio engineer on staff and intend to keep them on staff for the duration of your project (plus a year or two for support). TLDR: IMO Wwise may be a solid product, but only for projects with a minimum budget of approximately 7 figures.