[matheusmoreira]

> there isn't really any commercial value left in it though

I wonder why it never went mainstream. The Unreal engine went on to power a massive number of games. The Half-Life engines birthed a lot of mods, but wasn't used by many full games.

[throwaway27448]

Unreal won because they invested in a whole ecosystem of tools to build interactive media and the community to support it. Only unity really compares (and I'm not sure how true even that is these days).

[inigyou]

The Source engine isn't a blank slate engine like Unity. It's more like having unlimited power and permission to mod HL2. They just give you the HL2 code and say go nuts.