[daemin]

You'd think using Unreal Engine makes it easier to hire but that's not the case, it just means there's more competition for the people knowledgable in it, and it drives the people that want to work on something different to other studios. It also doesn't cut down on development time or the needed number of engine programmers since studios pretty much have to modify and enhance the engine, often replacing several components in order to ship the game. In some cases you'll end up with an incompatible fork which requires its own team to extend and enhance it, meaning that to upgrade to a newer version from Epic you'll need to spend months merging the codebases.

Overall I see the adoption of Unreal Engine as a net negative for the industry, it's reducing the landscape to a monoculture. For all the talk that Epic does about being against monopolies, Unreal Engine is becoming one in a big way, and killing the ecosystem as it grows.

[ethbr0]

For employees of the game industry, aren't standardized engines a net positive?

I can't think of many things worse in software development than "I'm an expert on my employer's obscure, only-used-here system."

Your employer knows you can't work anywhere else, and assuming they don't shoot themselves in the foot by allowing one person to become mission critical, they've definitely got the power in negotiations.

[daemin]

This is a fairly nuanced question so I'll try to explain some of the reasoning.

Unreal Engine is standard in so far as studios use it as a base in developing their own game, where they end up creating a fork because they need to adapt or more often replace entire systems. So in the end each studio ends up with their own non-standard fork of the engine, branched from a specific revision, and merging the latest changes from upstream will be at least a month long endevour. This is what I know from personal experience and from interviewing at about a dozen studios last year.

With this you get a slightly different version of the engine and tools at each studio, and it affects disciplines differently. For some creatives it ends up being the same at every studio because the tools they interact with remain largely unchanged, for others they end up using custom built tools at each studio. Likewise some programmers are fine just using the engine and developing systems on top, but others are not and it drives a lot of skilled people away.

So as an employee it is a double edged sword, on the one hand there's at least some standardisation where you are at least familiar with the tools and engine used in the new studio you're joining, but on the other hand you're now one in tens-of-thousands and much more of a replacable cog.

That is one of the supposed selling points of Unreal Engine to studios - that they can hire staff more easily - but if every studio uses the same engine then it's not a benefit. It also means that some skilled people won't want to join the studio, as they don't want to rewrite systems or be a code-janitor, and I've heard many people leaving studios because they switched to Unreal.

[KVFinn]

Yeah. If a game isn't well suited to Unreal, that game may well just not get made. But then again Factorio is one of the best selling PC games of all time. Maybe gameplay finds a way.

On CDPR specifically, I hope didn't make the decision to drop Red Engine because they happened to be at their lowest/weakest point in the last couple years after Cyberpunk came out and before Cyberpunk had a comeback -- and that's why they didn't feel strong enough to maintain their own engine.

Before that moment they were on top, and very recently Cyberpunk has had a sort of public redemption and a surprisingly strong long-term player base, so it feels like a shame. I still haven't seen a game in Unreal that matches Cyberpunk on high end PC hardware overall. The only game other than Cyberpunk that justifies raytracing is Minecraft RTX IMO.

[daemin]

Thanks for the kind words, it means a bunch to me and other devs that worked on the game!

I cannot comment to why they decided to switch to Unreal, but it is one of the reasons I left. I hope it works out for them but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the next game release.