[gambiting]

Uhmmm....I work for one of the top 3 largest game publishers in the world and all of our games are made using our own engines that were done in-house. Unity and Unreal Engine are only used for prototyping(with maybe one exception in Unity, but that was a small project done by a very few people).

[eropple]

There are a lot of "AAA" publishers that are not at the Ubisoft or EA level. Bandai Namco, for example, uses Unreal. So does Square-Enix.

[hurricaneSlider]

I guess I've only been exposed to the independent scene (which I would assert accounts probably for the majority of releases, if not the sales volume)

That you're using a handrolled engine is fine, I'm sure your company knows what they're doing. But in the context of this post, and for people who'd like to start game development/design, saying that most devs write their own engine is in my opinion damaging, as I really don't think that most smaller studios do. It increases the barrier to entry, and perpetuates a certain amount of elitism, which really considering the make up of the industry is no help at all.

[DTT]

>as I really don't think that smaller studios do

A great amount of indies do. Super Meat Boy was built with a hand rolled engine. Same for Cave Story, Binding of Isaac, Terraria, Stardew Valley, Dwarf Fortress, Celeste and many other memorable titles.

It's more intense on the Japanese side though. Loads of -doujin- game developers, like the many Touhou spinoffs games handroll their own stuff.

I'd say, using a prebuilt engine ecosystem has become more common with the appearance and growth of Unity but it hasn't stopped people doing their own thing and it certainly hasn't been a solely positive contribution, you criticize elitism in the days when the Steam store pages are flooded by trashy asset flips and barely working early access games that sometimes never truly get finished. A little bit elitism would in fact not hurt if we don't want to hit another video game industry crash.

[Pulcinella]

Stardew Valley and Celeste aren’t entirely custom. They both use XNA.

[holoduke]

I would fire you for your lack of knowledge. The top 100 mobile gaming apps are mostly unity based. Top 100 on steam heavily populated with unreal and unity based games.

[eropple]

You'd fire somebody for not knowing what people outside of a closed-loop corporate environment happen to use?

I mean, I posted 'cause he was wrong, but this is Bad Boss garbage.

[gambiting]

And which part of what I said disagrees with what you said? I just said how it's like at one of the top publishers in the world. I haven't said anything about anyone else or even about the industry as a whole. I guess I'm lucky you don't work in our HR department then!