[dijit]

the lead time for a new engine is about 7 years (on the low end).

I don’t think any company that has given up their internal engine could invest 7 years of effort without even having revenue from a game to show for it.

So the industry will likely rally around Unreal and Unity- and I think a handful of the major players will release their engines on license… but Unreal will eat them alive due to the investments in Dev UX (which is much-much higher than proprietary game engines IME). Otherwise the only engines that can really innovate are gated behind AAA publishers and their push for revenue (against investment for any other purpose).

All this to say, I’m sorry to disappoint you, its very unlikely.

Games will have to get smaller and have better revenues.

[sombragris]

I'm not implying at all that every game company should develop their own in-house engine.

But maybe, just maybe, they could request Epic or Unity to optimize their engines better for the lower end.

[dijit]

You cant optimise the general case

Optimisation is almost universally about tradeoffs.

If you are a general engine, you can’t easily make those tradeoffs, and worse you have to build guardrails and tooling for many cases, slowing things down further.

The best we can hope for is even better profiling tools from Epic, but they’ve been doing that for the last couple of years since borderlands.