[mjr00]

You're framing this as a thing done by a greedy corporation in an evil manner, which maybe it is, but it's also just a sign of the times.

For most of the 90s and 00s, your game engine, specifically idTech in this case, was a competitive advantage. Doom and Quake/2/3 all represented massive technological jumps over their predecessors and were way ahead of their competition in terms of looks. Games like Unreal (Tournament) and Tribes competed using their engines' strengths; those engines didn't look as good but were capable of rendering much larger spaces than idTech, and those games emphasized that, e.g. Tribes' massive multiplayer maps with vehicles, or classic UT maps like Facing Worlds and Lava Giant.

Then in the late 00s to 10s, things started to hit a wall. Probably peaking with Crysis in 2007, which is likely more remembered for its engine, graphics, and system requirements (all of which were truly mind-blowing at the time) than its actual gameplay. After that, games' graphics improved at a much slower rate; it started to be less about the engine's capabilities, which were increasingly homogenized, and more about art direction.

Now in the 2020s, we have UE5 for AAA games with high-fidelity graphics and Unity for everything else... what is the competitive advantage in maintaining your own engine? As you mention, you have to have internal expertise, which is less well-documented than UE5/Unity because you don't have dedicated documentation staff; you have to maintain your own tooling, which is likely worse because you haven't invested as much in it. From a ROI perspective, unless you're planning on investing so you can license out the engine and become a UE5/Unity competitor, it doesn't make sense to maintain your own engine.

And looking ahead, frankly, consumer GPUs are now so expensive that game graphics have likely peaked for at least a decade. There will simply not be better hardware available to gamers for the foreseeable future. Games "looking good" will be more about art style and direction, and you sadly do not need a team of game engine programmers for that.

[mortenjorck]

This is correct. It is entirely possible for both the archetypal blood-sucking MBA and the pragmatic industry veteran to reach the same conclusion for different reasons.

The build vs. buy calculus in game dev has been steadily shifting over the past 15 years, and when CD Projekt Red announced they were adopting UE5 for their next Witcher game, the writing was on the wall.

That said, Id could make a bold "commoditize your complements" move and open-source the latest, now last, IdTech. What Godot is to Unity, IdTech could be to Unreal Engine.

[ThatPlayer]

I think their use of 3rd party libraries could prevent them from releasing it as open source without rewriting a bit. This even happened to the original DOOM 1 where they used a sound library so didn't release the original DOS source code. Rather they released the Linux port which used a different sound engine that had different features/bugs.

Looking at the start-up of Doom Dark Ages (with new expansion today), they list Havok, Oodle, Bink, and SpeedTree. According to Havoc's website, that already starts at 50k$ alone. Oodle/Bink don't list prices.

[0xWTF]

Ok, so what has happened historically when we hold a tech stack constant for 10 years? Versioning proceeds, but everyone consolidates on a thing?

Python? => Data science. Sure, python is just importing the C tools that do the heavy lifting, but look me in the eye and tell me R, S, SAS, or SPSS won.

C? => I mean, everything? But what happened in the first 10 years? Proliferation of operating systems and linear algebra libraries?

So, generally, the grey beard talent consolidates their intellectual contributions and uplift everyone else. Is that true? -ish? Missing the mark?

Guys, I'm a knuckle-dragger, I genuinely don't know what I'm asking. What are the tech stacks that were held constant (by whatever factors) for a decade, and what came out of it?

Is this the decade where art directors takes over gaming?

[hunterpayne]

"Is this the decade where art directors takes over gaming?"

Considering the bad performance of the division can probably be blamed on the art and game designers, probably not. More than likely, the gaming industry is going to atomize. Meaning many very small companies, and fewer big studios. Alienating your audience isn't exactly a career enhancing move. And that's ultimately what triggered all of this and the move towards smaller (non AAA) games.

[YesBox]

> what is the competitive advantage in maintaining your own engine?

It's still a product-distinguishing decision you can make at the indie scale. What I mean is, you can create an engine that allows you to get the performance + aesthetic that otherwise would not be possible. i.e. Specialize in a profitable niche.

And if hardware costs keep ballooning, performance will become more important.

[kvathupo]

As a former AAA dev, this is spot on. At the end of the day, games are a business. Margins are not attractive and competition is fierce as the barrier to game development has lowered with Steam: both are downward pressures on wages.

After entering games with naive expectations of the wild west of the 90s, I would recommend other programmers not enter the AAA space, if compensation and job security are concerns. Indie game development looks like great fun, but don't expect any low-latency programming.

[GMoromisato]

Agreed. In addition, the purpose of games is to entertain players, not to provide jobs for developers.

[BikiniPrince]

It’s a little simpler than that. The games that use this engine have poor sales and no one is even buying idTech. There isn’t any reason to keep them around when Microsoft is losing 64 cents on every dollar. They chopped every unprofitable studio and cast several to their own budgets. Presumably they are going to sell off the mediocre studios and IP.

[MFHava]

> no one is even buying idTech

Kinda hard to buy an engine that is not for sale...

[reaperducer]

You're framing this as a thing done by a greedy corporation in an evil manner, which maybe it is, but it's also just a sign of the times.

Both can be true.

Just because it's becoming more common doesn't mean it's not bad.

[sleepybrett]

Man I miss tribes and tribes 2. Sadly the revival was garbage.

[shagie]

A nostalgia point for Tribes...

There was a lan gaming place back when people had dial up... and that place had a T1 to the store that had double low double digit ping times when triple digit was common.

Tribes was one of the games installed and this also had the advantage that when a few people in the store were playing it they could coordinate playing a tank much better than other players on the server.

MissionForce: CyberStorm is over on GOG for another game from that publisher from that timeframe.

[sleepybrett]

My roommate at the time and I both had jobs at the same webdev/hosting/isp place (oh how i miss the late 90s) and we got a deal on a shotgunned isdn connection (256kbps woooooo) to our place (working from home before it was cool). It was magical.

[shagie]

https://web.archive.org/web/20021014120633/http://www.ping-t...

They had 20 game machines (for the day)...

> Each gaming computer has a 1-Gigahertz Athlon, 21-inch Monitor, GeForce 2 GTS, Sound Blaster Live, 256Mb of 133Mhz RAM, 10/100 Ethernet card, and an optical logitech mouse.

that were in two rooms in the basement. You could get 10 people in one room, and 10 in another and then have team games against each other where you could talk freely without worrying about the other side hearing you (unless you were shouting).

> Each computer is on its own 100 Mbit Full Duplex switch port. The network as a whole is linked to the internet via a T1.

It was $2.50 / hour (and if you played for 3 hours, you would get another 2 hours free). On the weekends, high schoolers and college students would sometimes play for a good 10 hours for $15 (way cheaper than the classic quarter per play arcade).

The vending machine was stocked at $0.50 for each thing in it... so you could get a candy bar and soda for $1.00.

[shoobiedoo]

hah tribes just randomly popped into my head yesterday. it was the only fps that ever really had me hooked for long periods. such a great game

[sleepybrett]

The ski-jumping spin disking was wild times.

[ozgrakkurt]

I don’t think unreal engine games play and look as well as custom engine games. Like doom or cyberpunk. If you open cyberpunk without rtx etc. It really really looks good and also plays very well.

Also there is obviously a massive gap between how games look and what the hardware is capable of. Cyberpunk runs better than total war attila on my computer as an example.

Don’t write a database, don’t write a compiler, don’t write an os, don’t write a game engine… are we all supposed to write web apps at this point?

This mindset didn’t create what we have today and won’t create what we will have tomorrow. I recommend people that like building these things to ignore this pov as much as possible

[Melatonic]

UE5 can make a great and efficient game actually - its more about how you use it. And because its huge and popular and accessible there are a ton of developers using it very inefficiently.

That can be true for any commodity software though. Designing something inhouse means you inherently will have engineers and experts with better low level understanding. It doesnt mean it will be better (could even be much worse) but theres a tradeoff there.

[cubefox]

Yes. You basically still need a few engine programmers to use UE5 efficiently, even if it's not your own engine. UE5 seems to be user friendly enough that most of the game development can be carried out just by artists and game designers, but without engine programmers performance optimization will be poor.

[gambiting]

The core part of UE5 that people seem to forget is that it's FREE. During development you pay Epic exactly 0 dollars and even after launch you need to make very decent sales figures to actually pay anything at all.

So a lot of studios think oh, the engine is already finished, we just need artists and designers to use it, all the heavy lifting has already been done. And while yes, you can make a game that way, the results will be sub optimal. But then again, free is infinitely cheaper than having an engine team maintaing your own engine or any custom elements of UE.