[_hao]

Unreal is ahead for a couple of reasons (mainly historical + money) and they target industries outside of games as well now - namely film productions.

With that said most big AAA companies still use their proprietary game engines and I don't see that changing. General purpose engines like Unreal/Unity/Godot have their place of course, but to use the full set of features of Unreal you need a big team anyways, so comparing it to Unity and Godot doesn't seem right to me at least. Godot is slowly eating Unity's lunch though. Especially given the direction that Unity has taken after their IPO they might be in trouble in the near future.

Also there are some crazy people (like me) that just write their own engines for the projects they are doing and here's hoping that in time our number will actually grow. It would be very sad if the game engine world ends up like the OS or browser world for example.

[arocketman]

I am not sure about the "I don't see that changing". CD projekt red has adopted unreal engine leaving behind the engine they built AAA games such as The Witcher 3. I can see a future where more gaming houses adopt the engine as well.

[_hao]

There are good arguments from both sides of the fence in the “generic solution” VS “custom solution” debate. I think the decision should be made on a case by case basis after sufficient analysis has been conducted. For example, I wouldn’t do an RTS/Total War type game in either of the 3 aforementioned engines. Also it should be noted that sign of the times is that we’ll be getting less AAA games, not more. It’s clear that those huge budget games carry substantial risk if not successful (hence early incremental updates, DLC, mico-transactions etc.) and studios are weary of that.

For CD Project the move to Unreal might make sense just from labour market perspective - it’s easier to hire programmers for Unreal than to train programmers to learn and develop your own in-house engine. Larger community and support already exists for Unreal etc. That move will affect their bottom line on their next games though. 5% is nothing to scoff at for a big product from a big company.

In any case, I’d advise caution to companies relying entirely on a single platform for their business. To echo my previous statement choosing only between Android and iOS for mobile is an illusion of choice. If you’re a mobile game dev your entire business relies on two relatively hostile companies.

[klodolph]

Crazy people writing their own engines—growing in absolute numbers, shrinking in relative numbers.