The focus of a lot of engine dev is shifting away from AAA. For the AAA model, everything was about heavily optimizing the runtime performance of mostly-static

The focus of a lot of engine dev is shifting away from AAA. For the AAA model, everything was about heavily optimizing the runtime performance of mostly-static scenes towards large teams delivering complex assets. The engineering team has skills and depth - enough to support every release with custom technology work. But new projects are often much smaller in scope, and that has a consequence for all the technology. With smaller projects, pressure moves back towards development cost, ease of deployment and maintenance, which is a lot more like the model for small-site webdev. The necessary optimization for the runtime is more often at the level of just using correct algorithms, good-enough memory management, and feeding the GPU correctly. In turn, this is going to have a commodifying effect on engine runtimes - if your scene is already easily hitting its quality target at 144hz or whatever the high end is today, your concerns are just going to shift towards how fast you can iterate and debug, add and tune new assets, create one-off behaviors, and run off final builds for external use. You can hire for design rather than coding talent. This favors a "game creation system" model like Ren'Py or Puzzlescript, where the underlying formats and protocols still allow a substantial degree of customization, including the possibility of moving the data to a different runtime altogether, but the developer's interface works on abstractions all tuned around that particular type of game. This path follows what's happened to audio with the development of synthesizers; after the early modular synthesizers proved the concept, a commercial market arose for delivering "complete instruments" that are less flexible in abstract, but are more portable, and offer an easier mix of performance and programmability, through presets and limited customization parameters. And today, for every popular genre, you can get started by "buying the sound" in the form of sample loops and synth presets, and then build out your own work by hanging off customizations. New genres appear simultaneously with the successful commercialization of new technologies - e.g. drum machines, or Autotune. There's no reason why games won't go in the same direction, given enough time.