Stomped has posted a Q&A with Monolith's Jason Hall, talking to him about their recent announcement regarding their plans to start up a separate company to handle their LithTech engine. Here's an excerpt where Jason explains the reasoning behind this decision:

There are many reasons for forming a subsidiary. Without giving a lecture on "Managing and growing a successful business" I will just say that our reasons primarily have to do with following a carefully planned business strategy, increasing team focus, multi-platform and new technology projects, etc. The engine licensing business to us is just that, a real business. In order to service our customers in the best possible way it is important for us to be very organized and keep everything as scaleable as possible.

The industry is maturing and the historically mixed message of "game company selling an engine" also needed to be clarified. There are many advantages to this type of approach. Most of these advantages will amount to strong support, more rapid technological advancement, solid partnerships and extensive and comprehensive tools. There are still many unannounced things with regard to LithTech Inc., but rest assured you will hear about them soon, and get even a better vision of how exciting what we are doing is. LithTech is a strong technology with a solid strategy and plan behind it. Our licensees (the vast majority of which are unannounced) are going to benefit immensely from their decision to build their game team's competency in the LithTech technology. Few things are worse than paying for extremely expensive people to learn a system that is going nowhere. That is just a ton of wasted money. With LithTech, not only can we show you that the technology is growing and moving towards the future, we can prove it.