ShiVa Game Engine: End of Support, and Where ShiVa Developers Go Next

ShiVa was one of the first commercial 3D engines to reach the iPhone, and for a decade few competing engines offered the same breadth: one project, one click, and your game ran on twenty-odd platforms — desktop, browser, console, and every mobile OS that existed at the time. Ubisoft shipped the mobile Prince of Persia 2 remake on it.

In March 2023, ShiVa Technologies ended support. No more updates, no bugfixes, no compatibility work, no security fixes — and, in the company’s own words, “No new ShiVa sales will be accepted.” You cannot buy ShiVa today, and if you are running it, nothing underneath you is being maintained. This page covers what ShiVa was, exactly what the shutdown means if you still have a project on it, and where its own developers told customers to go.

What Was ShiVa?

ShiVa (also written ShiVa3D) was a commercial cross-platform 3D game engine with a WYSIWYG editor, built by the French company Stonetrip from 2003 and continued by ShiVa Technologies SAS. Games were scripted in Lua, and a single project could export to more than twenty platforms. It was sold as paid perpetual-licence editions with no royalties or subscription, alongside a free Web Edition whose exports were watermarked. ShiVa Technologies ended public support and sales in March 2023.

ShiVa Reached End of Support in March 2023

This is the single fact that matters most, and it comes from the company itself rather than from rumour. The notice on ShiVa’s own site sets out four things:

• ShiVa Editor 1.x, ShiVa Editor 2.0, the engines, the exporters and the online services all reached the end of their public support period.
• No further updates, bugfixes, third-party compatibility work or security fixes will be released.
• No new sales. The product is not purchasable.
• Existing customers may keep using it until they find alternatives. Public support by email, Slack, Skype and phone was phased out during March 2023 and ended in April.

The reason given is commercial rather than technical. ShiVa sold for a one-time fee against competitors with, in the company’s phrasing, massive financial backing who could offer their services essentially for free. As licence sales declined, the team took contract work for automotive, mechanical engineering and design clients — which is why ShiVa 2.0 beta releases slowed to a trickle over its final years. None of that contract work could be folded back into the editor. Eventually one major client required the team’s full attention, and the public product was retired.

Where ShiVa’s Own Team Said to Go

Unusually, the shutdown notice included specific migration advice, which is worth repeating because it comes from people who knew both the engine and its users. These were ShiVa Technologies’ recommendations as of 2023, not necessarily the only sensible choices now:

• Unity — described as ShiVa’s closest and longest-standing competitor, with good-to-excellent cross-platform support and a stable, versatile editor. Their honest caveat: performance could be better, but the community size more than compensates.
• Unreal — recommended for small teams of experienced developers, with an acknowledgement that the learning curve is steep and demanding even for a well-trained team.
• Godot — singled out as the easiest landing for ShiVa veterans, because the editor is structured similarly and everything is built cross-platform first. They also flagged it as open source, which they framed as a future-proofing advantage — a pointed remark from a team whose customers had just been stranded by a proprietary product.

That last point is the lesson of this whole page. Every ShiVa developer’s project outlived the company that sold them the tools. An open-source engine offers a different kind of continuity: it can still be abandoned, but the source stays available for someone else to preserve or continue.

One aside on their letter: it mentions the demise of earlier competitors including Torque. That is half right — GarageGames stopped selling Torque, but the engine survived as an MIT-licensed community project and was still taking commits when we checked it for our own Torque profile in 2026, which is precisely the difference open-source availability can make.

If You Still Have a ShiVa Project

Archive everything now. The company explicitly advised customers to secure installers, sample packs, tutorials, API documentation and videos from its website, GitHub and YouTube channels, because it does not plan to host those resources indefinitely. That was written in 2023; anything still up is running on borrowed time.

Understand what “no updates” means in practice. Your existing builds may continue to work on the machines and devices they already run on. What stops is everything at the edges: when Apple or Google changes its store requirements, when a new OS version breaks an exporter, when a security issue surfaces in a bundled library — nobody is fixing any of it. For a shipped mobile title, that is a countdown rather than a stable state.

Plan the port rather than defer it. There is no official migration path out of ShiVa. In practice, Lua gameplay logic has to be rebuilt for the destination engine, and assets exported and adapted to a new pipeline. If the project still earns money, budget the rebuild while you still have people who remember how it works.

How ShiVa Got Here

2003–2005. Stonetrip is founded in France by Philip Belhassen and Nicolas Peri, and ships the first version of ShiVa in 2005.

2008–2012, the mobile boom. ShiVa Technologies describes the engine as one of the first commercial 3D engines on the iPhone, and that is what made its reputation: developers who had never written mobile code could ship to the App Store, then re-export the same project to Android, macOS, browsers and consoles. Ubisoft ships Babel Rising 3D in eight parallel versions and the mobile Prince of Persia 2 remake.

January 2013, liquidation. Stonetrip enters liquidation. Community manager Felix Caffier tells customers to keep making games and insists “this is not the end of ShiVa.”

Late 2013, the respawn. The company reforms as ShiVa Technologies SAS, the stores come back online, and ShiVa 1.9.2 ships with 64-bit improvements. ShiVa 2.0 is promised with a new interface, native Mac support and multicore use.

2014–2022, the long beta. The first ShiVa 2.0 beta arrives in July 2014. It never leaves beta. Releases slow as the team takes industrial contract work.

March 2023, end of support. Sales and product updates stop; public support channels are phased out through March and end in April.

What ShiVa Actually Did

Stripping out the marketing language the previous version of this page inherited, the engine’s substance was:

• Lua scripting, with native C++ compilation support and a C++ plugin architecture — though exporting C++ plugins required a paid edition. Plus APIs for real-time mesh modification with morphing, and networking for multiplayer against ShiVa’s own server product.
• Renderers for OpenGL, OpenGL ES and Direct3D, with stereoscopic 3D modes.
• A plugin architecture that let the engine be extended with third-party libraries including NVIDIA PhysX, FMOD and ARToolKit.
• Lighting and shadows — real-time point and directional lights, screen-space blurred cascaded shadow maps, and a full lightmap workflow with a built-in shadow mapper and ambient occlusion.
• Post-processing — bloom, motion blur, depth of field, camera distortion.
• ODE physics with compound bodies, a 2D HUD system, and stereo and 5.1 audio.
• The editor — live preview, a Lua code editor with autocompletion and debugging, module editors for particles, materials, terrains, HUDs and animation, asset import, an embedded server for multiplayer testing, and export to Xcode, Visual Studio or Eclipse projects for developers who preferred their own IDE.

On platform support: the previous version of this page listed BlackBerry 10, Windows Phone 7.5, Marmalade, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo Wii and Internet Explorer as current targets. They were real, and that breadth was genuinely ShiVa’s headline feature — but every one of those platforms is now dead, and the exporters that targeted them stopped being maintained in 2023. Treat the twenty-platform claim as a historical fact about the mobile era, not as something you can rely on today.

Games Built With ShiVa

ShiVa’s own “Made with ShiVa” showcase runs to dozens of entries, and it is worth noticing how many are not games: architectural visualisation, city and campus projects, interactive brand work for TAG Heuer, a Coldplay music video experience, ski-resort maps. It is a reminder of how widely ShiVa was used outside games — and it rhymes with how the story ended, given the industrial and design contract work the company later took on.

Key Takeaways

• ShiVa reached end of support in March 2023. No updates, no bugfixes, no security fixes, and no new sales.
• You cannot buy it. New licences are no longer available; existing licence holders can keep using their copies without official support.
• It was a genuinely significant engine — described by its makers as one of the first commercial 3D engines on the iPhone, with one-click export
• Its business model became hard to sustain: one-time licence sales, no royalties or subscription, against engines that were free to start with.
• ShiVa’s own team recommended Unity, Unreal or Godot, and singled out Godot as the easiest move for ShiVa veterans.
• If you still run a ShiVa project, archive the installers and documentation now — the company said it would not host them indefinitely.
• The platform list that made ShiVa famous is now largely made up of dead platforms: BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Vita, Wii.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

ShiVa deserves better than being remembered as a footnote. It got 3D games onto the iPhone before most people believed that was practical, it was designed around exporting a single project to twenty-plus platforms, and it did all of it for a flat fee with no royalty clause — which, in hindsight, was both its appeal and its undoing.

The practical position in 2026 is simple: it is not for sale, it is not maintained, and if you depend on it you should be planning your exit rather than your next feature. Its own team pointed at Godot for people who liked the ShiVa way of working, and that is sound advice for the reason they gave — an open-source engine cannot be withdrawn from you. For everything still in active development, our directory of 100+ C and C++ game engines sorts the field by licence and category.