[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.