Quick answer. No, but they do help…a lot.
Implementing audio in a game is no small task. Developers will often overlook some of the details when doing this themselves, whether for final builds or early stage demos. There are concepts that unless someone shows you, you may never notice. That is, especially on small Indie games, where sound designers can really pay for themselves.
Surprisingly a topic such as audio middleware falls into this category quite often, it’s something that has never come up on a dev’s radar before, and without “knowing what you don’t know” it can be hard for “non-audio” folk to know why they need it.
By all accounts in-engine audio systems have come along way and a huge amount of games just use these tools and some custom scripts to service everything their game needs. Middleware doesn’t really do anything that is impossible without it, it just makes the process of building and implementing complex and simple audio systems incredibly scalable and offers some workflow benefits that would take a great deal of time more.
Another huge benefit to middleware comes is that the “blank canvas” that a sound designer has when starting on a project is always the same. All though it is inevitable there will be lots of work to do in the game engine itself, having a standardised workspace to use from the outset is incredibly useful not only to get working quickly but also to re-use tools and setups to perform basic tests and profiling.
For actual SFX creation using middleware can also speed up the process. By having the ability to quickly try out different combinations of layering sounds in middleware it can help to cut down on a huge amount of time loading a large bloated DAW project, layering up some sounds, rendering this sound and some variants, loading them into your engine and then testing – instead you can simply do alot of this work directly from FMOD or Wwise, meaning you can “on-the-fly” try new layering and timing ideas which can then remain as your final events or be replicated back in your DAW.
I mentioned it briefly before, but another aspect that can often overlooked by dev’s is audio profiling and debugging. Being able to do quite complex tasks like recording all audio events from a gameplay session, then play it back while adjusting audio event parameters is not essential, but a process that is HUGELY sped up by working with FMOD and Wwise’s build in profiling tools. It can help find bugs and just smooth out the overall mix of the games SFX.
Like with all aspects of producing a game the number of audio assets that a project needs can easily creep up, and up, and up, and up… Middleware also has all the tools needed to organise these assets, events, snapshots etc in such away that they not only make sense to a developer, but also for a sound designer who may not need to dig through endless lists of scriptable objects, lists and arrays to find the string refence needed to call a specific event, just right click on the event and copy the path from inside FMOD, done!!
These workflows and arguments for Middleware are not even scratching the surface of what is made easier and fast when using them, but crucially they are not needed, but for most projects they certainly will either allow you to work faster, or at least smarter.