its harder to hire new devs if engine is built in house, because no one outside the company understands how to use said engine unless its open for the public to use. thats the biggest drawback of in house engines (other than the increased develepment life cycle to develop one)
Comment on Anon is a game dev
nul9o9@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month agoCompanoes don’t want to invest in creating their own engine anymore, so now we get unoptimized unreal engine games now.
Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Or your engine can do something that’s hard to do with Godot, Unity or Unreal
Maalus@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Which is increasingly unlikely.
EldenLord@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This is only a problem if you want unsustainable growth/enshittification and to treat your devs like shit with bad pay and endless crunch time.
Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Kojima is an example of giving dev too much freedom that its basically further putting you into the red had he been strung along for the ride during metal gear solid 5’s development and the money spent optimizing fox engine. Theres a fine line between endless crunch time/micromanaging, and letting your devs do work.
to put up a few examples, The upcoming Metroid prime 4 is an example when a company gives devs too much freedom. The original japanese studio didn’t know what hte fuck they were doing, so Nintendo pulled them off hte project, and gave their project to retro, who was working on the “Project harmony” game, which looked very bad, to the point that nintendo was fed up with the hands off approach and Kensuke Tanabe reinserted himself back as director to get prime’s development back into production getting Prime 4 out later this year.
Part of the reason for the huge microsoft layoff that happened a few days ago is mainly because of microsofts more handsoff approach they gave their developers. they gave ninja theory 5 years to develop Hellblade 2 (which is a relatively long time). They gave Compulsion games 5+ years to develop South of midnight. neither game remotely probably paid of their development cost, in juxtaposition to a studio like Obsidian, who has in the same time frame, released 5 different games, some arguably more expansive than the previous 2 studios games, due to being well managed.
and I’m not really pointing fingers here, but keep in mind, its not solely due to unsustainable growth/enshittification and treating devs like shit and endless crunch time causing this problem. It’s mainly lack of better people/resource management because there are countless numbers of studios who get significantly more time than they should on a project with not much to show for it.
Valmond@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Is it though? I mean big companies most probably tweak whatever engine they use too, and the whole game is closed source, so company specific stuff is obiqutous to say the least.
Good points otherwise IMO.
Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
yes, but tweaking whatever engine they have, still uses a lot of the underlying engines code, which more freemarket devs will use. There’s a huge reason why a lot of the companies who build engines in house are in japan, because labor laws in japan makes it so developer retention is usually very high.
Kojima and fox engine is an example of a well designed and optimized engine, but konami didn’t like it because of how much millions kojima spent developing both it and MGS5 hence the bad blood between them
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
That’s not the problem. But why spend tume and money to optimize your assets if the gamers will buy better hardware and you can even strike a deal with a big vendor.
szczuroarturo@programming.dev 1 month ago
There is also the fact that graphic reached the point where marginal improvments require disproportionate amount of firepower.
Plus the im pretty sure that a lot of new features are made moreso to ease the work of developers and graphics improvments are nice side effects ( i think i read that ray tracing lightining is actually easier to do , alghtough you do need hybrid solutions while the games do not require ray tracing but that part is changing and we do have first games that require ray tracing ) . I think thats the reason we see a small renesance of AA games at this moment.
vane@lemmy.world 1 month ago
you have access to unreal engine source code, the problem is companies don’t want to pay people to optimize engine
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 1 month ago
If you have the talent and manpower to create your own engine, it’s better business to make that engine your product instead of whatever game you wanted to make.
Valmond@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I disagree here, making an engine you’d sell must be top notch in every aspect (or close to), an in-house engine only needs to get the job done for your game. Probably two orders of magnitude in needed workforce, depending on your needs ofc.
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Very very few actual profitable companies roll their own engines.
Supercell has their own, but it’s because they started before there was anything available.
Indie games make their own engines but it’s more of a hobby or passion project, not something that can employ two dozen people to develop it.
EldenLord@lemmy.world 1 month ago
From Software and Hideo Kojima would disagree. The highest form of passion for your game is to create an engine that gives it the exact gameplay formula you want it to have.
bussubbus@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
It’s not really that great of a business.
Epic is estimated to have made $275M revenue on Unreal engine in 2023, vs $4.7B on Fortnite
Unity made $614M revenue on engine & tools in 2024, in ads and monetization they made $1.2B
These are stable industry standard engines, if you start work on your challenging engine today it’ll take years to develop, gain game-developers interest and trust. And still you’re competing with giants that use their engines as loss-leaders.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The advantage of making your own engine is that you can specialize for your specific gameplay.
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 1 month ago
If you game is something that needs it, definitely go for it.
Something like Noita comes to mind
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
Factorio to i believe
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Then you only get a big geneal thing like Unity again.