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Well, that's why Unreal is starting to get back into it. It's also why id should be licensing their engines, and open sourcing them. Bethesda/id/Zenimax, are y

Well, that's why Unreal is starting to get back into it. It's also why id should be licensing their engines, and open sourcing them. Bethesda/id/Zenimax, are you just afraid of money, success, graditude, and forming long-lived communities around your games that can mod and hack them, to keep the games feeling fresh, and thus people buying them, decades into the future?

FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago
> Bethesda/id/Zenimax, are you just afraid of money, success, graditude, and forming long-lived communities around your games that can mod and hack them, to keep the games feeling fresh, and thus people buying them, decades into the future? Surely you're being facetious? I can't tell, my sarcasm detector is broken
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  No, I'm not entirely being facetious. Just a little bit :-). Well money and success aren't guaranteed, graditude and a better community around your games is.
Impossible 10y ago
I don't think id would be successful with licensing in modern times without seriously changing their focus away from game development. Sure there is a great legacy of building games on id tech, but a modern game engine that is flexible enough to build a wide variety of game types and support different team sizes and platforms is difficult to build. For example, I seriously doubt idtech currently runs on any mobile platforms. Most AAA game engines are good at making a game or a subset of games, and I imagine idtech 6 is great at making Doom, and by association pretty good at making first person shooters, but its not really possible to make a mobile match 3, 2D visual novel, or MOBA with it without heavily modifying C++ source. If you look at the HN discussion around Crytek open source, and peer into the source code, you'll have a good idea of the reality of many in house engines. In practice this is an advantage for AAA teams with strong engineers, because you can out compete people using licensed engines using features targeted for your game, but it makes it hard to do wide licenses to small teams that don't want to just make simple mods for your game.
- mjevans 10y ago
  I think the question for them is if it's worth it to license their engine for use by other titles in the genera it well fits, or if they feel that cuts too much in to their opportunity costs. With the right partners (E.G. some company making an FPS based on a movie) the deal might work in their favor.
greyskull 10y ago
This comment comes up often in the gaming community. My guess: they've done the math and the business gains do not outweigh the inputs. Between the codebase sanitation and the licensing issues with third-party products, that would be a pretty massive headache. There's the intellectual property argument to make as well. For modding specifically, that also dictates how your game is built and requires extra work to do it right. Not every game needs it. The reality also is that it's easier to sell people games on a shorter cycle when the previous one doesn't have legs. I imagine the vast majority of the gaming population don't think twice about modability - they're happy playing a focused game and eventually leaving it behind.
- Fr0styMatt88 10y ago
  To be honest I'm not sure that the game engines market isn't already saturated, raising the bar even further for a big AAA newcomer. Like others have said it isn't just about 'opening your engine' and leaving it at that. All of a sudden you have to polish up your editor for external consumption (ooops.... the editor is crashing on this PC config that we've never had in the office?), write documentation and tutorials, putting out really good examples, engaging with this new type of community, etc. Is there honestly room in the market for an engine without a clear niche these days? I mean you seem to have Unity and UE4 at the top tiers, then engines carving out a niche (Godot comes to mind), your lower-level stuff (how's OGRE doing these days?). There's a few random ones on Steam even (Leadwerks, GameMaker Studio, RPG Maker, etc) for other use-cases. I think of CryEngine 3 -- that's the most recent move by a big player into the engines-for-everyone space. How is it doing these days? My impression is that it's struggling to get mindshare, but it has been awhile since I've looked. I'd be wary of bringing a new engine into the space after watching how that's going for them.
  - Pfhreak 10y ago
    > I think of CryEngine 3 -- that's the most recent move by a big player into the engines-for-everyone space. There's also Lumberyard, Amazon's new entry into the game engine market: https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/ https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/ It's not Open Source, but you do get the engine and all the source for free. It's built on technology from CryEngine, Double Helix, AWS, Twitch, with a significant number of bugfixes, improvements, and features. I'm genuinely excited to see where it goes, but, in full disclosure, I work for Amazon Games Studios (though not on Lumberyard).

FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago

> Bethesda/id/Zenimax, are you just afraid of money, success, graditude, and forming long-lived communities around your games that can mod and hack them, to keep the games feeling fresh, and thus people buying them, decades into the future? Surely you're being facetious? I can't tell, my sarcasm detector is broken

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
No, I'm not entirely being facetious. Just a little bit :-). Well money and success aren't guaranteed, graditude and a better community around your games is.

Impossible 10y ago

I don't think id would be successful with licensing in modern times without seriously changing their focus away from game development. Sure there is a great legacy of building games on id tech, but a modern game engine that is flexible enough to build a wide variety of game types and support different team sizes and platforms is difficult to build. For example, I seriously doubt idtech currently runs on any mobile platforms. Most AAA game engines are good at making a game or a subset of games, and I imagine idtech 6 is great at making Doom, and by association pretty good at making first person shooters, but its not really possible to make a mobile match 3, 2D visual novel, or MOBA with it without heavily modifying C++ source. If you look at the HN discussion around Crytek open source, and peer into the source code, you'll have a good idea of the reality of many in house engines. In practice this is an advantage for AAA teams with strong engineers, because you can out compete people using licensed engines using features targeted for your game, but it makes it hard to do wide licenses to small teams that don't want to just make simple mods for your game.

mjevans 10y ago
I think the question for them is if it's worth it to license their engine for use by other titles in the genera it well fits, or if they feel that cuts too much in to their opportunity costs. With the right partners (E.G. some company making an FPS based on a movie) the deal might work in their favor.

greyskull 10y ago

This comment comes up often in the gaming community. My guess: they've done the math and the business gains do not outweigh the inputs. Between the codebase sanitation and the licensing issues with third-party products, that would be a pretty massive headache. There's the intellectual property argument to make as well. For modding specifically, that also dictates how your game is built and requires extra work to do it right. Not every game needs it. The reality also is that it's easier to sell people games on a shorter cycle when the previous one doesn't have legs. I imagine the vast majority of the gaming population don't think twice about modability - they're happy playing a focused game and eventually leaving it behind.

Fr0styMatt88 10y ago
To be honest I'm not sure that the game engines market isn't already saturated, raising the bar even further for a big AAA newcomer. Like others have said it isn't just about 'opening your engine' and leaving it at that. All of a sudden you have to polish up your editor for external consumption (ooops.... the editor is crashing on this PC config that we've never had in the office?), write documentation and tutorials, putting out really good examples, engaging with this new type of community, etc. Is there honestly room in the market for an engine without a clear niche these days? I mean you seem to have Unity and UE4 at the top tiers, then engines carving out a niche (Godot comes to mind), your lower-level stuff (how's OGRE doing these days?). There's a few random ones on Steam even (Leadwerks, GameMaker Studio, RPG Maker, etc) for other use-cases. I think of CryEngine 3 -- that's the most recent move by a big player into the engines-for-everyone space. How is it doing these days? My impression is that it's struggling to get mindshare, but it has been awhile since I've looked. I'd be wary of bringing a new engine into the space after watching how that's going for them.
- Pfhreak 10y ago
  > I think of CryEngine 3 -- that's the most recent move by a big player into the engines-for-everyone space. There's also Lumberyard, Amazon's new entry into the game engine market: https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/ https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/ It's not Open Source, but you do get the engine and all the source for free. It's built on technology from CryEngine, Double Helix, AWS, Twitch, with a significant number of bugfixes, improvements, and features. I'm genuinely excited to see where it goes, but, in full disclosure, I work for Amazon Games Studios (though not on Lumberyard).