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Each of those studios started with a game. There are 10x many more small companies that rolled their own game engine around this time that are now dead, or boug

by dexwiz 6y ago

Each of those studios started with a game. There are 10x many more small companies that rolled their own game engine around this time that are now dead, or bought for their engine. The best tools grow first alongside a real product. Building a tool without a target product almost always misses the mark.

accidentalrebel 6y ago
I am curious, which companies were bought because of their game engines?
- jimbob45 6y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp Naughty Dog by Sony > In all honesty, the biggest reason we're not using GOAL for next-gen development is because we're now part of Sony. I can only imagine Sony's shock when they purchased Naughty Dog a few years back, hoping to be able to leverage some of our technology across other Sony studios, and then realized that there was no way anyone else would be able to use any of our codebase. Sony wants us to be able to share code with other studios, and this works both ways - both other studios using our code and vice versa. Add this to the difficulty curve of learning a new language for new hires, lack of support from external development tools (we had our own compiler, linker, and debugger, and pretty much had to use Emacs as our IDE), etc, means that there are clearly a lot of other factors involved. Note, however, that these issues aren't really technical problems, they're social ones. — Scott Shumaker
gfxgirl 6y ago
> Building a tool without a target product almost always misses the mark. There is no evidence to back this claim up. There are > 10000 shipping games made with Unity, maybe 100000. And there are many hit games made with it as well. I'm not claiming they are or are not as good "technically" but they shipped, made lots of players happy, made their developers proud and successful so no mark was missed just because Unity started as tool without a real product alongside. If fact I'd argue the opposite, most teams that make their own engines have the worst tools because they have a limited budget and limit time and they've given themselves 3x to 10x the work. Instead of making a game they have to also make a game engine, tools, importers, converters, and tons of libraries.

by dexwiz 6y ago

accidentalrebel 6y ago

I am curious, which companies were bought because of their game engines?

jimbob45 6y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp Naughty Dog by Sony > In all honesty, the biggest reason we're not using GOAL for next-gen development is because we're now part of Sony. I can only imagine Sony's shock when they purchased Naughty Dog a few years back, hoping to be able to leverage some of our technology across other Sony studios, and then realized that there was no way anyone else would be able to use any of our codebase. Sony wants us to be able to share code with other studios, and this works both ways - both other studios using our code and vice versa. Add this to the difficulty curve of learning a new language for new hires, lack of support from external development tools (we had our own compiler, linker, and debugger, and pretty much had to use Emacs as our IDE), etc, means that there are clearly a lot of other factors involved. Note, however, that these issues aren't really technical problems, they're social ones. — Scott Shumaker

gfxgirl 6y ago

> Building a tool without a target product almost always misses the mark. There is no evidence to back this claim up. There are > 10000 shipping games made with Unity, maybe 100000. And there are many hit games made with it as well. I'm not claiming they are or are not as good "technically" but they shipped, made lots of players happy, made their developers proud and successful so no mark was missed just because Unity started as tool without a real product alongside. If fact I'd argue the opposite, most teams that make their own engines have the worst tools because they have a limited budget and limit time and they've given themselves 3x to 10x the work. Instead of making a game they have to also make a game engine, tools, importers, converters, and tons of libraries.