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by sorenjan 1335 days ago
I don't follow game development closely anymore, but my feeling is that UE5 with features like Nanite, Lumen, etc is so advanced that you can't expect an inhouse engine to come close. Or are there other engines that's at the same level? Frostbite used to be cutting edge years ago, but some of the developers left EA and I haven't seen any excitement about it since.

Add to that things like huge install base that should make it pretty well tested at this point, big asset library, plenty of educational material available, and I guess it's a pretty easy decision for game studios. But I'm not in the business, maybe there are big downsides as well.
4 comments
joseda-hg 1335 days ago
You're pretty much on point, unless you're making something really specific/that needs every bit of performance that it can get, you're better served by an existing engine

A good example of something that was better served by inhouse engine is Factorio, but that' uncommon

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seba_dos1 1335 days ago
Another case is doing something technologically simple enough that benefits from having a fully customized workflow outweigh having to write some stuff by yourself. This can happen with content-heavy genres like, say, 2D point'n'clicks - you don't get much by using an existing engine there, but you have to follow its idiosyncrasies which may or may not work well for you and your team.
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rubyist5eva 1335 days ago
Recruitment is part of it as . It’s not possible to find people that haven’t worked at your company to have experience with your custom engine - but you can hire people with years of experience with Unreal already and ramp them up for your specific game quickly.
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pjmlp 1335 days ago
Engines are complex beast nowadays, my graduation thesis was porting a particle engine based visualization engine from NeXTSTEP into Windows.

What was a graduation thesis 20 something years ago, is nowadays a basic feature in a bullet point feature list.

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sbergot 1335 days ago
I think you are on point. The engine source code is also available which helps to limit the risks of vendoring a core tool for big teams. The unreal engine product team seems to understand the market very well and has very good execution and marketing.
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