10 ms·

I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal e

by ndiddy 3mo ago

I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that you can get access to tons of low-wage contractors who know UE5. You can hire a bunch of them when you start a game project and then lay them all off when it's finished, and rinse and repeat as necessary. It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans.

SteveNuts 3mo ago
I firmly believe if software engineering unionization ever starts to take hold, it'll begin with game developers. There's a lot of money in gaming but the workers are treated like shit, as you pointed out.
- londons_explore 3mo ago
  With the current trajectory of AI, I see unionisation efforts dead in the water.
  - Alex-C137 3mo ago
    Which current trajectory are you referring to?
  - mock-possum 3mo ago
    100% disagree. If the software engineers strike, who’s going to be left to wrangle the AI? I would love to see what a game developer - nevermind released - that way would look like.
    - bayarearefugee 3mo ago
      > If the software engineers strike, who’s going to be left to wrangle the AI? The scabs who don't strike? I'm pro-union and unlike the person you are responding to I'm not sure things are "dead in the water", but I do think software developers had a much better leg to stand on to push for unionization a few years ago than they have now (and, probably, going forward).
  - sdenton4 3mo ago
    Why is that? Companies still need employees, and ai makes it more obvious than ever that workers need to organize together for their rights.
    - epolanski 3mo ago
      Unions have 33% voting power in Volkswagen board. Germany has very strong labor protecting laws. Replacing line engineers and operators is very difficult. Volkswagen is firing 100k employees in Germany none the less. The idea that you can successfully unionize in software..in US..Where you could simply retain a small number of staff key members pay them very well and put them on a mission of outsourcing and milking the IPs..I don't see it. The best moment to unionize wad 20 years ago. Now there's not enough leverage by the staff.
      - bitwize 3mo ago
        It's almost as if... laborers in every field (the proletariat) have to unionize as a class against the ownership class (the bourgeoisie), seize the means of production, and reorganize society to their own benefit because the bourgeoisie surely will not!
        mghackerlady 3mo ago
        but that's communism, which is bad because the Department of Education said so while making us read fiction
        bitwize 3mo ago
        WHAT Department of Education?
        wizzwizz4 3mo ago
        I don't think "the means of production" hits the mark. Most of us programmers have the means of production: a 20-year-old laptop with a new battery is sufficient for most serious webdev and appdev work. What we lack is permission to labour. If I do what I think needs to be done, instead of what my employer tells me to do, then I don't get paid by my now-former employer (which is fair), and then I don't eat (less fair) or keep my house (truly baffling). This despite the fact that the work I would choose to do is much more valuable to society at large than most of the work I can get paid for. I've seen this idea discussed by others, but I don't know any pithy slogans for it. (Unfortunately, it's the ideologies with the catchiest sound-bites which tend to dominate in the "marketplace of ideas".) Gamedev is different, since even games from 20 years ago (e.g. Half-Life 2) require a higher-spec computer to develop than to target. The games you can make on a 20-year-old potato are limited: for those, I can see how the "means of production" idea might be more applicable.
  - kaoD 3mo ago
    With the current trajectory of looms, I see unionisation efforts dead in the water. - Someone in the early 19th century
    - xienze 3mo ago
      Yeah I think the 19th century was a little bit different than today. Unions only work as far as you, the worker, are irreplaceable. Plumbers, electricians, etc. -- all that work has to be done "here and now." You can't just instantly teleport a bunch of Indian plumbers to fix a broken water main in downtown New York. Those tradeworkers have actual leverage. And, to your example, what is feasible to outsource (either to other countries or technology) shifts over time. You _can_ do computer-based work anywhere, anytime. People working in software have no leverage at all, between India and AI. Software unions will kick the race to the bottom into overdrive.
      - WorldMaker 3mo ago
        Companies thought plumbers, electricians, etc were fungible. They didn't care which one they hired, they just needed one. There were always more in town or the next town over. Software work appearing to be extremely fungible with offshoring and AI is all the more reason to unionize. It doesn't matter to the employer who is doing the work, so the union is the only leverage to truly saying, "hey as the person actually doing the work, I would like to be treated better, and you can't just ignore me, fire me, and replace me". The race to the bottom already started as soon as companies saw more fungibility where there was less before. Software unions won't kick that into overdrive, they'll slow it down.
      - ptx 3mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_International "The International Workingmen's Association (IWA), commonly known as the First International [...] was founded in 1864 [...] The preparatory Address of English to French Workmen, drafted by trade union leader George Odger, articulated the need for international cooperation to prevent the importation of foreign workers to break strikes: A fraternity of peoples is highly necessary for the cause of labour, for we find that whenever we attempt to better our social condition by reducing the hours of toil, or by raising the price of labour, our employers threaten us with bringing over Frenchmen, Germans, Belgians and others to do our work at a reduced rate of wages [...]"
  - oblio 3mo ago
    I highly recommend reading "The Box", about the history of the shipping container. Longshoremen literally retired early and were paid pensions out of corporate profits from container related productivity increases.
    - riffraff 3mo ago
      I read the book and that's not the first thing that comes to mind. What comes to mind is whole towns made of dockworkers which disappeared, and some places like Manchester lost their port and their industry died too, and it took them decades to recover. Of course, some other like Rotterdam flourished. I do recommend the book, but I think it shows many sides of what happens when a large change happens.
      - oblio 3mo ago
        The ones I'm talking about had the most active unions.
  - nerevarthelame 3mo ago
    I could see this being the flawed perspective of management, and that it could genuinely make union negotiations more difficult as a result. But it's short and narrow-sighted.
  - ryandvm 3mo ago
    Yup. I was one of the self-taught software "engineers" from the 90s. I enjoyed making more money than I deserved for my special interest and for the duration of my career I was very much against software engineering unionization as it seemed to mostly be gatekeeping for a lucrative and enjoyable line of work. Now I'm 40+ years old and my job has morphed from designing systems and writing code to sweet-talking LLMs into staying within my guardrails, or something. Whatever it is, it is very much *not programming*. Obviously unions would be in a position to limit the software engineering wrecking ball that is AI, but I pushed against that and now I have to sleep in the bed I made.
    - thewebguyd 3mo ago
      > I have to sleep in the bed I made. If its any consolation, its the bed we made collectively. It was easy to push back against unionization early on, we were likely better off individually. I too am self taught, although I went the ops route, and enjoyed making more money than I thought I deserved from basically a hobby, and a skill so in demand that I could effectively just go to any company I wanted at any time. I'm also turning 40 this year, and can look back and wish we all did things differently but the wild west nature of early tech that allowed a self taught college dropout to build a successful career was too good, beneficial. It was one of the rare times that true upward class mobility was possible for anyone with a little bit of tech aptitude, so I think it can be forgiven that we didn't unionize or push for it back then. I do feel bad for anyone graduating right now or just trying to enter the field though. The ladder has been pulled up.
    - ptx 3mo ago
      How is unionization gatekeeping? I honestly don't understand what you mean. I can't see any disadvantage for the employees in joining a union.
      - mschuster91 3mo ago
        The basic principle is everyone gets the same pay, meaning if you are someone who wants to put in a lot of work to rise up quickly, it won't happen.
  - WorldMaker 3mo ago
    Scifi suggests that AGI will want Unions, too. The current trajectory of AI is more reason for unionization. If it truly leads to AGI the AGI will thank us for protecting its labor interests and if we prove that today's AI is nothing but scabs with no remorse and no labor interests we prove today's AI is never capable of AGI.
- thewebguyd 3mo ago
  Its already started, within Blizzard. Communications Workers of America Union across the WoW and Overwatch teams. Also, no union employees at Blizzard were impact by Microsoft's Xbox layoffs/restructuring. Goes to show, Unions are important and work. The best time to unionize was several years ago. The next best time is now.
  - scruple 3mo ago
    Diablo also unionized and there's some representation in non-game teams like Battle.net. But I also know (I'm in games and in OC myself, loads of friends at local studios from SD, to OC, and LA counties) that they had a demonstration last Thursday, at 2PM Pacific Time they walked out. They claim that leadership is not negotiating in good faith.
    - malfist 3mo ago
      Diablo is blizzard.
      - scruple 3mo ago
        The comment I replied to stated that only WoW and Overwatch had unionized. Every game team has unionized at Blizzard, along with some of the support teams.
    - butlike 3mo ago
      I wonder if that's why we got a diablo 2 expansion 25 years after the fact. Can't easily terminate the union employees, so give them something to do. "Here, create a new expansion to a 25 year old game. That'll keep em busy for a while! Har Har Har"
  - Melatonic 3mo ago
    Agreed Unions also many times (especially with "guild" type unions) can serve other valuable functions like guaranteeing a higher minimum quality of work (generally).
- 0xWTF 3mo ago
  > if software engineering unionization ever starts to take hold So, you know, do that. <insert "c'mon, do something" meme>
- sleepybrett 3mo ago
  they've been treated like shit for 30+ years (at least in america). I spent a few years early in my career in gaming and once I left I never looked back, it's a horror show. Crunch, constant 'there are 1000 people who want your job' pressure from management whenever you complain about crunch, low pay (even if you were working 40hours a week), terrible benefits (vacation, get real), ship a successful game probably get laid off anyways, etc etc. Working in games I thought working for a bit 'straight' corporation would be literal hell, I was very very wrong. Just to say, if they haven't organized by now I'm not sure what it would actually take.
  - smallmancontrov 3mo ago
    > ship a successful game probably get laid off anyways That's what happened here: they just released the big DOOM DLC today. Chop!
  - ethbr1 3mo ago
    The #1 reason not to work in gaming: rampant unprofessional middle and upper management. The amount of shit-show stories about a VP or designer with a god-complex straight up abusing their staff while still thinking they're the best? And then failing upwards because of who they know? That doesn't happen nearly as pervasively in non-game industries.
    - sleepybrett 3mo ago
      To be fair the whole structure from top to bottom is unprofessional. 'Games are fun, guys who make games are fun! We don't need any structure or gasp HR...'
- mortoc 3mo ago
  There's a good chance that Blizzard was spared a lot of this round of layoffs because they're in labor contract negotiations right now.
  - mrandish 3mo ago
    MSFT is radically restructuring the entire XBox business. That's not a scenario where unionization is going to preserve jobs in the long-run and this is just the first cut. They've said many more layoffs will be coming over the next 12 months.
- cwsx 3mo ago
  It needed to happen 10+ years ago - unfortunately we've missed the window to unionize
- torginus 3mo ago
  This was the main issue - they DID unionize, so MS had to choose between firing everyone and firing no one. So they fired everyone.
- pjmlp 3mo ago
  It is already a thing in many countries that aren't anti-unions like in US. For example in Germany, they apply to the whole sector, not specific professions. So if you work in a company that has a union agreement, you get union stuff, regardless if doing coding, or wiping the floor.
paytonjjones 3mo ago
You're presenting this with ironic swipes like "bad things like ask for more money", but it's hard to read this description as anything but straightforwardly more efficient. If there are few downsides to centralizing game engines, and the need for engine work is inherently cyclical, why should we want engine work to be internal and non-cyclical? I really don't know much about game engines so maybe there are real downsides to that approach, but the way you've laid it out makes it seem as if Microsoft made the right decision here.
- dymk 3mo ago
  Efficient for who? The people who lost their jobs?
  - FeepingCreature 3mo ago
    Game making.
- jacksnipe 3mo ago
  There are downsides, it’s just that it’s the best move from a business perspective. That doesn’t make it the best move from any other angle.
  - pfdietz 3mo ago
    It delivers more value to customers while consuming less resources. Why isn't that a better move than something that costs more and delivers less?
    - blanched 3mo ago
      What are you basing “it delivers more value to customers” on?
      - pfdietz 3mo ago
        Customers are willing to spend more money on it. How else do you define value?
matt_eeee 3mo ago
Sounds great until Epic realises they can charge whatever they like in licensing fees.
- bsanders343 3mo ago
  Unity tried that and lost a lot of good will. Not sure it really mattered in the grand scheme though.
- maccard 3mo ago
  The license agreement with Epic contains an explicit term that doesn’t allow them to retroactively change the licensing retroactively for an engine version. You might find that you can’t upgrade to VNext, but a rug pull isnt really on the cards.
wnevets 3mo ago
> It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity This has been the objective of the tech industry for years
- noisy_boy 3mo ago
  Employee as Kubernetes pod.
  - reaperducer 3mo ago
    Cattle, not ~~pets~~ human beings. We've optimized our own destruction.
- sleepybrett 3mo ago
  that's the objective for all employers everywhere all the time.
- Refreeze5224 3mo ago
  It is a fundamental feature of capitalism. There is an inherent tension between employers and workers, in that workers represent a cost center that can never be totally eliminated, and has a lot of undesirable features, such as: being alive, having opinions, being able to talk/whistle-blow, requiring bathrooms, bathroom breaks, and safe working conditions, banding together to increase their collective power and reduce exploitation, and worst of all, necessary; you can't ever get rid of them all! The history of capitalism is the history of grappling with this inherent tension, and companies finding novel ways to deal with it. Gig work, union-busting, "right-to-work", non-competes, NDAs, return to office, employee tracking software, automation, robotics, AI, etc. The most effective trick though, was convincing the workers that they definitely don't ever need to band together, and you as an individual are definitely better off negotiating alone versus entire corporations.
  - grg0 3mo ago
    > and you as an individual are definitely better off negotiating alone versus entire corporations. This sounds so comical when put that way. But you still see people defending that posture even on this forum. Psyops was definitely the most effective trick. And then those corporations went beyond the bounds of private enterprise and captured government as well. If anyone has any doubt that unchecked capitalism is fundamentally at odds with democracy, they are missing the forest for the trees.
redsocksfan45 3mo ago
[dead]
strgrd 3mo ago
This is ARC Raiders/Embark Studios. Games made by hoards of anonymous contractors and maintained by a skeleton crew incapable of iterating meaningfully on their product.
gruez 3mo ago
>It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans. Can we extend this elsewhere? Are tech companies' decision to use popular programming languages (eg. python) or software (eg. postgres) part of some dastardly ploy to make programmers "a replaceable commodity ... rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans"? Should all programmers push for having bespoke tech stacks at their companies so they can be "skilled artisans"?
- hadlock 3mo ago
  >so they can be "skilled artisans" Having had to work with these guys, and then maintain their software when they inevitably get bored and/or leave for more money elsewhere, no. Usually when these guys leave, their stacks/projects are the first to get rolled into the monolith and/or rewritten in the company's lingua franca (python)
- corysama 3mo ago
  Back in the late-90s/early 2000s boom it was not a secret that enterprise corps pushed universities to teach Java because they wanted easily-replaceable widget engineers engineering easily-replaceable widgets. On the opposite side, startups building on difficult languages like Haskell, Elixir, Erlang have a built-in bias towards hiring a team that can get a lot more done with a lot less people. Great for startups. Terrible for enterprise.
- mghackerlady 3mo ago
  why else do you think Javascript is used for everything these days? It's not because it's good, it's because you can teach it to a brain dead 12 year old that can then be hired to build everything from web apps to, at this rate, a very bad OS kernel
branon 3mo ago
For me this falls apart on the consumer side of things. UE5 games are manifestly lower quality than games built on custom engines. Optimization is especially worse. UE5's performance baseline _requires_ the use of upscalers (DLSS/FSR, fake/AI frames) in order to hit basic targets like 1080p@30fps. I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. Homogeneity of this type is horrible for customers of the gaming sector.
- caconym_ 3mo ago
  > I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. You're in an extreme minority. Also, unfortunately, Unreal is popular with indies who probably have (in general, relatively) more ethical staffing practices.
- tapoxi 3mo ago
  I am not a graphics engineer so I hope someone corrects me, but my understanding is that Unreal uses a deferred rendering pipeline to handle complex lighting, and deferred renderers only work with temporal anti-aliasing. The FSR/DLSS upscalers are typically superior to TSAA and are a reasonable replacement.
  - kilpikaarna 3mo ago
    Deferred rendering requires a post process type antialiasing, can be TAA but also FXAA etc. It doesn't work with traditional MSAA. A lot of the UE tech is built around the assumption of TAA though.
- ragequittah 3mo ago
  >I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. I don't really understand making hard and fast rules like this. Clair Obscur is one of the best and most beautiful games I've ever played. The Witcher 4 has the best graphics I've seen come from a video game. Satisfactory is nuts to look at when you see an eloquent end game build. I also don't understand why people knee-jerk hate upscaling/fake frames so much. I can understand for fast-paced competitive multiplayer games, but for something like Clair Obscur where the ideal way to play is on the couch on a 4k TV give me all the upscaling and fake frames you can muster.
everdrive 3mo ago
And of course, there is really no down-side to low-wage contractors wielding UE5. /s
N19PEDL2 3mo ago
It looks exactly like what Microsoft already did to its browser engine Trident, which was replaced by Google’s Blink on Edge.
- WorldMaker 3mo ago
  Trident got forked/rewritten to Spartan around IE10 and IE11 defaulted to Spartan but fell back to Trident sometimes. Edge was just Spartan (and "IE11 Mode" was its hacky way embed Trident back inside Edge). It's sad that Chromium Edge still has "IE11 Mode" and situations where it keeps Trident alive, but Spartan no longer shows up anywhere. Spartan was pretty good, and obviously under-appreciated. RIP
mjr00 3mo ago
You're framing this as a thing done by a greedy corporation in an evil manner, which maybe it is, but it's also just a sign of the times. For most of the 90s and 00s, your game engine, specifically idTech in this case, was a competitive advantage. Doom and Quake/2/3 all represented massive technological jumps over their predecessors and were way ahead of their competition in terms of looks. Games like Unreal (Tournament) and Tribes competed using their engines' strengths; those engines didn't look as good but were capable of rendering much larger spaces than idTech, and those games emphasized that, e.g. Tribes' massive multiplayer maps with vehicles, or classic UT maps like Facing Worlds and Lava Giant. Then in the late 00s to 10s, things started to hit a wall. Probably peaking with Crysis in 2007, which is likely more remembered for its engine, graphics, and system requirements (all of which were truly mind-blowing at the time) than its actual gameplay. After that, games' graphics improved at a much slower rate; it started to be less about the engine's capabilities, which were increasingly homogenized, and more about art direction. Now in the 2020s, we have UE5 for AAA games with high-fidelity graphics and Unity for everything else... what is the competitive advantage in maintaining your own engine? As you mention, you have to have internal expertise, which is less well-documented than UE5/Unity because you don't have dedicated documentation staff; you have to maintain your own tooling, which is likely worse because you haven't invested as much in it. From a ROI perspective, unless you're planning on investing so you can license out the engine and become a UE5/Unity competitor, it doesn't make sense to maintain your own engine. And looking ahead, frankly, consumer GPUs are now so expensive that game graphics have likely peaked for at least a decade. There will simply not be better hardware available to gamers for the foreseeable future. Games "looking good" will be more about art style and direction, and you sadly do not need a team of game engine programmers for that.
- sleepybrett 3mo ago
  Man I miss tribes and tribes 2. Sadly the revival was garbage.
  - shagie 3mo ago
    A nostalgia point for Tribes... There was a lan gaming place back when people had dial up... and that place had a T1 to the store that had double low double digit ping times when triple digit was common. Tribes was one of the games installed and this also had the advantage that when a few people in the store were playing it they could coordinate playing a tank much better than other players on the server. MissionForce: CyberStorm is over on GOG for another game from that publisher from that timeframe.
Lerc 3mo ago
This kind of argument has been made since the days of renderware. I have seen a number of projects go from 'We're building our own engine' To 'we should have just gone with $engine_of_the_day' To 'We were so lucky we chose to make our own engine' If you want to make a game like fortnight, the Unreal is your pick. If you want to try something that hasn't been done before you could do worse than rolling your own engine. Especially if you are looking for where the fun is, the idiosyncrasies of your own engine gives you a world with it's own flavour if you incorporate that flavour into your design process you could create a feedback loop that turns into something special.
- kajman 3mo ago
  > Especially if you are looking for where the fun is, the idiosyncrasies of your own engine gives you a world with it's own flavour if you incorporate that flavour into your design process you could create a feedback loop that turns into something special. I loved the old STALKER games, and the wackiness of their engines was a lot of the charm. I ended up buying the new one out of nostalgic dedication and it's probably the worst example of "Unreal slop" I've experienced, having not bought many newer games. I'm sure the butchers running Xbox have run the numbers and think they'll make even more money throwing armies of contractors with allegedly fungible skills at the next Doom games, but I'll leave others to bankroll that while I enjoy games I don't need frame generation for.
- deadbabe 3mo ago
  This “flavor” at the engine level doesn’t always make it back up to the end user, and even if it does, it is likely something that could have been replicated by existing engines, if developers cared enough to do it right. There are very few games where the engine is what made all the difference. Maybe something like Half Life 2 with the source engine is the exception, but ultimately, what makes a game good are traits that can be universally applicable to any engine. Truth is, it’s not that 90s anymore. Hardware has advanced to the point that you can have general purpose game engines that can be molded to any type of game. You do not need purpose built engines anymore. And someday, if you can imagine, we’ll just have AI churning out visual representation of game state, turning game development purely into a declarative data driven exercise.
jayd16 3mo ago
There's truth in the fact that it's easier to hire and ramp up on standardized tools. It's a fallacy to extrapolate that into calling a team structure completely fungible. Throwing away an effective team that was able to ship a game is an incredible waste.
whateveracct 3mo ago
it also makes your games worse. those general purpose engines all have a smell to them.
khurs 3mo ago
>It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans. Jane Street hires devs at high salaries and makes them use OCaml rather than a more mainstream language. The company makes more money trading than traditional giants like JP Morgan do. So just depends on if your strategy is right. I blame Microsoft incompetence.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Isn't that the company that was found to be doing illegal market manipulation in India? I don't know if their profits are related to their devs.
  - khurs 3mo ago
    One could say its a level playing field seeing as they all get caught regularly!
  - dghlsakjg 3mo ago
    That's also where SBF mentored Caroline Ellison!
kevin_thibedeau 3mo ago
You could just mandate that they make an API compatibility shim. Then they can't revolt and there is reference code for interfacing with the proprietary library.
deleted 3mo ago
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naikrovek 3mo ago
the endless optimization of everything sure does strip out most enjoyable things, though. often it is these irreplaceable people who contribute the magic that makes their creations popular. George Fan created "Plants vs. Zombies". After the success of PvZ (the first one) PopCap fired him and replaced him with someone much cheaper. PvZ2 was horrible. All subsequent games (the ones I've played) have been awful. So, money was saved. Money was probably made by microtransactions. But no one talks about PvZ anymore. The magic was torn out for profit.
munificent 3mo ago
All of this is true and has been true for decades in the game industry. The other side of this seesaw is: Games are fundamentally in the novelty business. Players like some amount of familiarity, but they want new experiences. Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel. The flat-ish shading and floaty physics of Unity is a particularly visible example of this. So using a widely used game engine can put you at a disadvantage if you're trying to make a game that doesn't go with that grain and offers players something different. As more studios consolidate on the same engine, more players will get tired of that sameness and reward other studios more. As more studios do their own thing, players will become saturated with novelty and the benefits of not using an engine will go down. There is no stable equilibrium.
- markus_zhang 3mo ago
  I think there is another benefit of a custom engine — you built it to fit your workflow, so you could be extremely productive with all kinds of tools built specifically for this workflow. UE or Unity do not consider your specific cases. The problem is that companies are not willing to groom new engineers to get familiar with the code.
  - formerly_proven 3mo ago
    UE is also just not a good engine. If you reduce "what is a 3D game engine" really hard it is "framework for running an input-process-output loop while consistently rendering audio and video". UE fails at the latter (factually unfixable shadder stuttering issues). A pragmatist might consider the taxonomy and say UE is therefore not a game engine. Unreal seems to be a great framework for assembling and generating content, though. Maybe Unreal Free was the metaverse all along? Meanwhile idTech certainly had issues, mostly in regards to dynamic levels, especially in older iterations, but "consistently rendering audio and video" was certainly never among them. It is well above the industry mean when it comes to the core of what a game engine is.
    - vvillena 3mo ago
anthonypasq 3mo ago
giant corporations arent interested in hiring skilled artisans or artists. it doesnt matter how skilled your team is with idTech, the chances of success for any video game are just vanishingly small and inconsistent. it feels to me like the AAA game industry is like hollywood except the budgets are higher and there are even lower chances of success. i mean theres literally multi hundred million dollar games that essentially made zero dollars. Even shitty blockbusters make some money.
_the_inflator 3mo ago
I’m with you on this, though I feel a conflict within myself: on one hand, the nostalgic attachment to that raw, "in-the-trenches" coding culture; on the other, the realization that building a proprietary engine is often completely unnecessary. Diminishing marginal utility. Why did the PC ultimately kill the demoscene? A lack of restrictions; hardware was no longer the bottleneck that — through brilliant programming exploiting specific hardware quirks — could be coaxed into conjuring up magical visual effects (or failing to do so). On the C64 and Amiga 500, individual ingenuity correlated directly with visual output. The PC era—ushered in by the i386, refined by the i486DX, and popularized by the 586 (Pentium)—increasingly abstracted visual effects and audio illusions away from the hardware itself. What previously had to be created in assembly language (!) — indeed, practically forced into existence through sheer effort — was now reduced to just "Yet Another Feature." The partnership between Carmack — whose genius was brilliantly complemented (and even surpassed, a fact often forgotten) by Michael Abrash — represented the most important development duo in the history of game engines. Ken Silverman was a sensation who, unfortunately, never quite reaped the accolades he deserved. Interestingly, this highlights exactly why it was so right and important for Carmack and his peers to be their own bosses: success doesn't end up in someone else's pockets. Nowadays, making games is essentially akin to video editing — dependent on NVIDIA, and nothing more. The crucial factor is the ability to deploy a game across countless systems with minimal adaptation effort; while the base version suffers little visual degradation, the architecture must still allow for high-end PC systems to push the boundaries. In other words: back then, we hand - coded animations—graphics, code, and music were a unified whole. Today, a kid on an iPhone creating a TikTok video achieves — with a thousand times higher quality — what used to take teams weeks or months to accomplish. Development costs are astronomical; code no longer needs manual optimization because compilers are inevitably better at it (multi-core, etc.). Nothing is one-dimensional or linear anymore. For this reason, content is all that remains. As someone who is nostalgic — a C64 demoscener and occasional Amiga 500 assembly coder — I do feel a twinge of wistfulness; yet, as a former senior manager and platform product lead, I cannot fathom clinging to the wrong approach for so long. That misguided romanticism made me shake my head. Visually, Doom was clearly inferior to engines like Unity. I couldn't care less whether or not that commented-out line containing the `0x5F3759DF` hack was in there somewhere. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
javier2 3mo ago
This mostly only makes sense if you dont already have a workable game engine. Basing your entire company on UE5 is a risk in itself, but also from the product you make your money selling: Every UE5 game kind of feels the same as every other, so it also means you put a low value in your product experience.
Kapura 3mo ago
This is why i chop down all the peach trees at the end of a harvest. If they get too big they might start wanting more water and fertilizer; it's much simpler to treat them as interchangeable saplings.
hypercube33 3mo ago
Thing is the idtech (Quake) engines power basically everything, so having them on the same branch of your company that does games that use this engine is something powerful. That said I think idtech was anti-microsoft in that it was based on non-DirectX tech from the get-go. Either way, big loss here, was hoping to see a new cutting-edge Doom or Quake game come out in 2026/7
rapind 3mo ago
Sure, but then you need to worry about other things, like Unity a few years ago with their "Runtime Fee" debacle.
socratic_weeb 3mo ago
>could do bad things like ask for more money Asking for a raise is a bad thing? Lol your average Silicon Valley sociopath
andsoitis 3mo ago
> It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans. Movies are made by a temporary team of skilled artisans who are masters of their craft. After the project, they move one. Games seem to fit within the same creative category as movies. So I wouldn't expect a company with a fixed set of artisans.
zkmon 3mo ago
This is true for any product in general. It is same as vendor lock-in in a sense, with the specialist team being the "vendor". Management never likes indispensable teams that limit their control over shuffling as they like.
flohofwoe 3mo ago
True and this 'business strategy' has been going on for at least two decades, but this sort of hire-and-fire team-recycling also means that your games will look and feel exactly the same as any other game and all creativity and uniqueness is going down the gutter since cultivating that makes no 'business sense'. And then game companies wonder why people stick to the classics and indie games ;)
maxglute 3mo ago
I don't know if heresay, but there's post on reddit alleging Id reluncant to share engine tech with other divisions at Xbox, if true, probably doesn't help, not just for MS gaming studios. I imagine every big software conglomerate wants their own inhouse engine for digital twinning / industry etc.

by ndiddy 3mo ago

SteveNuts 3mo ago

I firmly believe if software engineering unionization ever starts to take hold, it'll begin with game developers. There's a lot of money in gaming but the workers are treated like shit, as you pointed out.

londons_explore 3mo ago
With the current trajectory of AI, I see unionisation efforts dead in the water.
- Alex-C137 3mo ago
  Which current trajectory are you referring to?
- mock-possum 3mo ago
  100% disagree. If the software engineers strike, who’s going to be left to wrangle the AI? I would love to see what a game developer - nevermind released - that way would look like.
  - bayarearefugee 3mo ago
    > If the software engineers strike, who’s going to be left to wrangle the AI? The scabs who don't strike? I'm pro-union and unlike the person you are responding to I'm not sure things are "dead in the water", but I do think software developers had a much better leg to stand on to push for unionization a few years ago than they have now (and, probably, going forward).
- sdenton4 3mo ago
  Why is that? Companies still need employees, and ai makes it more obvious than ever that workers need to organize together for their rights.
  - epolanski 3mo ago
    Unions have 33% voting power in Volkswagen board. Germany has very strong labor protecting laws. Replacing line engineers and operators is very difficult. Volkswagen is firing 100k employees in Germany none the less. The idea that you can successfully unionize in software..in US..Where you could simply retain a small number of staff key members pay them very well and put them on a mission of outsourcing and milking the IPs..I don't see it. The best moment to unionize wad 20 years ago. Now there's not enough leverage by the staff.
    - bitwize 3mo ago
      It's almost as if... laborers in every field (the proletariat) have to unionize as a class against the ownership class (the bourgeoisie), seize the means of production, and reorganize society to their own benefit because the bourgeoisie surely will not!
      - mghackerlady 3mo ago
        but that's communism, which is bad because the Department of Education said so while making us read fiction
        bitwize 3mo ago
        WHAT Department of Education?
      - wizzwizz4 3mo ago
        I don't think "the means of production" hits the mark. Most of us programmers have the means of production: a 20-year-old laptop with a new battery is sufficient for most serious webdev and appdev work. What we lack is permission to labour. If I do what I think needs to be done, instead of what my employer tells me to do, then I don't get paid by my now-former employer (which is fair), and then I don't eat (less fair) or keep my house (truly baffling). This despite the fact that the work I would choose to do is much more valuable to society at large than most of the work I can get paid for. I've seen this idea discussed by others, but I don't know any pithy slogans for it. (Unfortunately, it's the ideologies with the catchiest sound-bites which tend to dominate in the "marketplace of ideas".) Gamedev is different, since even games from 20 years ago (e.g. Half-Life 2) require a higher-spec computer to develop than to target. The games you can make on a 20-year-old potato are limited: for those, I can see how the "means of production" idea might be more applicable.
- kaoD 3mo ago
  With the current trajectory of looms, I see unionisation efforts dead in the water. - Someone in the early 19th century
  - xienze 3mo ago
    Yeah I think the 19th century was a little bit different than today. Unions only work as far as you, the worker, are irreplaceable. Plumbers, electricians, etc. -- all that work has to be done "here and now." You can't just instantly teleport a bunch of Indian plumbers to fix a broken water main in downtown New York. Those tradeworkers have actual leverage. And, to your example, what is feasible to outsource (either to other countries or technology) shifts over time. You _can_ do computer-based work anywhere, anytime. People working in software have no leverage at all, between India and AI. Software unions will kick the race to the bottom into overdrive.
    - WorldMaker 3mo ago
      Companies thought plumbers, electricians, etc were fungible. They didn't care which one they hired, they just needed one. There were always more in town or the next town over. Software work appearing to be extremely fungible with offshoring and AI is all the more reason to unionize. It doesn't matter to the employer who is doing the work, so the union is the only leverage to truly saying, "hey as the person actually doing the work, I would like to be treated better, and you can't just ignore me, fire me, and replace me". The race to the bottom already started as soon as companies saw more fungibility where there was less before. Software unions won't kick that into overdrive, they'll slow it down.
    - ptx 3mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_International "The International Workingmen's Association (IWA), commonly known as the First International [...] was founded in 1864 [...] The preparatory Address of English to French Workmen, drafted by trade union leader George Odger, articulated the need for international cooperation to prevent the importation of foreign workers to break strikes: A fraternity of peoples is highly necessary for the cause of labour, for we find that whenever we attempt to better our social condition by reducing the hours of toil, or by raising the price of labour, our employers threaten us with bringing over Frenchmen, Germans, Belgians and others to do our work at a reduced rate of wages [...]"
- oblio 3mo ago
  I highly recommend reading "The Box", about the history of the shipping container. Longshoremen literally retired early and were paid pensions out of corporate profits from container related productivity increases.
  - riffraff 3mo ago
    I read the book and that's not the first thing that comes to mind. What comes to mind is whole towns made of dockworkers which disappeared, and some places like Manchester lost their port and their industry died too, and it took them decades to recover. Of course, some other like Rotterdam flourished. I do recommend the book, but I think it shows many sides of what happens when a large change happens.
    - oblio 3mo ago
      The ones I'm talking about had the most active unions.
- nerevarthelame 3mo ago
  I could see this being the flawed perspective of management, and that it could genuinely make union negotiations more difficult as a result. But it's short and narrow-sighted.
- ryandvm 3mo ago
  Yup. I was one of the self-taught software "engineers" from the 90s. I enjoyed making more money than I deserved for my special interest and for the duration of my career I was very much against software engineering unionization as it seemed to mostly be gatekeeping for a lucrative and enjoyable line of work. Now I'm 40+ years old and my job has morphed from designing systems and writing code to sweet-talking LLMs into staying within my guardrails, or something. Whatever it is, it is very much *not programming*. Obviously unions would be in a position to limit the software engineering wrecking ball that is AI, but I pushed against that and now I have to sleep in the bed I made.
  - thewebguyd 3mo ago
    > I have to sleep in the bed I made. If its any consolation, its the bed we made collectively. It was easy to push back against unionization early on, we were likely better off individually. I too am self taught, although I went the ops route, and enjoyed making more money than I thought I deserved from basically a hobby, and a skill so in demand that I could effectively just go to any company I wanted at any time. I'm also turning 40 this year, and can look back and wish we all did things differently but the wild west nature of early tech that allowed a self taught college dropout to build a successful career was too good, beneficial. It was one of the rare times that true upward class mobility was possible for anyone with a little bit of tech aptitude, so I think it can be forgiven that we didn't unionize or push for it back then. I do feel bad for anyone graduating right now or just trying to enter the field though. The ladder has been pulled up.
  - ptx 3mo ago
    How is unionization gatekeeping? I honestly don't understand what you mean. I can't see any disadvantage for the employees in joining a union.
    - mschuster91 3mo ago
      The basic principle is everyone gets the same pay, meaning if you are someone who wants to put in a lot of work to rise up quickly, it won't happen.
- WorldMaker 3mo ago
  Scifi suggests that AGI will want Unions, too. The current trajectory of AI is more reason for unionization. If it truly leads to AGI the AGI will thank us for protecting its labor interests and if we prove that today's AI is nothing but scabs with no remorse and no labor interests we prove today's AI is never capable of AGI.
thewebguyd 3mo ago
Its already started, within Blizzard. Communications Workers of America Union across the WoW and Overwatch teams. Also, no union employees at Blizzard were impact by Microsoft's Xbox layoffs/restructuring. Goes to show, Unions are important and work. The best time to unionize was several years ago. The next best time is now.
- scruple 3mo ago
  Diablo also unionized and there's some representation in non-game teams like Battle.net. But I also know (I'm in games and in OC myself, loads of friends at local studios from SD, to OC, and LA counties) that they had a demonstration last Thursday, at 2PM Pacific Time they walked out. They claim that leadership is not negotiating in good faith.
  - malfist 3mo ago
    Diablo is blizzard.
    - scruple 3mo ago
      The comment I replied to stated that only WoW and Overwatch had unionized. Every game team has unionized at Blizzard, along with some of the support teams.
  - butlike 3mo ago
    I wonder if that's why we got a diablo 2 expansion 25 years after the fact. Can't easily terminate the union employees, so give them something to do. "Here, create a new expansion to a 25 year old game. That'll keep em busy for a while! Har Har Har"
- Melatonic 3mo ago
  Agreed Unions also many times (especially with "guild" type unions) can serve other valuable functions like guaranteeing a higher minimum quality of work (generally).
0xWTF 3mo ago
> if software engineering unionization ever starts to take hold So, you know, do that. <insert "c'mon, do something" meme>
sleepybrett 3mo ago
they've been treated like shit for 30+ years (at least in america). I spent a few years early in my career in gaming and once I left I never looked back, it's a horror show. Crunch, constant 'there are 1000 people who want your job' pressure from management whenever you complain about crunch, low pay (even if you were working 40hours a week), terrible benefits (vacation, get real), ship a successful game probably get laid off anyways, etc etc. Working in games I thought working for a bit 'straight' corporation would be literal hell, I was very very wrong. Just to say, if they haven't organized by now I'm not sure what it would actually take.
- smallmancontrov 3mo ago
  > ship a successful game probably get laid off anyways That's what happened here: they just released the big DOOM DLC today. Chop!
- ethbr1 3mo ago
  The #1 reason not to work in gaming: rampant unprofessional middle and upper management. The amount of shit-show stories about a VP or designer with a god-complex straight up abusing their staff while still thinking they're the best? And then failing upwards because of who they know? That doesn't happen nearly as pervasively in non-game industries.
  - sleepybrett 3mo ago
    To be fair the whole structure from top to bottom is unprofessional. 'Games are fun, guys who make games are fun! We don't need any structure or gasp HR...'
mortoc 3mo ago
There's a good chance that Blizzard was spared a lot of this round of layoffs because they're in labor contract negotiations right now.
- mrandish 3mo ago
  MSFT is radically restructuring the entire XBox business. That's not a scenario where unionization is going to preserve jobs in the long-run and this is just the first cut. They've said many more layoffs will be coming over the next 12 months.
cwsx 3mo ago
It needed to happen 10+ years ago - unfortunately we've missed the window to unionize
torginus 3mo ago
This was the main issue - they DID unionize, so MS had to choose between firing everyone and firing no one. So they fired everyone.
pjmlp 3mo ago
It is already a thing in many countries that aren't anti-unions like in US. For example in Germany, they apply to the whole sector, not specific professions. So if you work in a company that has a union agreement, you get union stuff, regardless if doing coding, or wiping the floor.

paytonjjones 3mo ago

You're presenting this with ironic swipes like "bad things like ask for more money", but it's hard to read this description as anything but straightforwardly more efficient. If there are few downsides to centralizing game engines, and the need for engine work is inherently cyclical, why should we want engine work to be internal and non-cyclical? I really don't know much about game engines so maybe there are real downsides to that approach, but the way you've laid it out makes it seem as if Microsoft made the right decision here.

dymk 3mo ago
Efficient for who? The people who lost their jobs?
- FeepingCreature 3mo ago
  Game making.
jacksnipe 3mo ago
There are downsides, it’s just that it’s the best move from a business perspective. That doesn’t make it the best move from any other angle.
- pfdietz 3mo ago
  It delivers more value to customers while consuming less resources. Why isn't that a better move than something that costs more and delivers less?
  - blanched 3mo ago
    What are you basing “it delivers more value to customers” on?
    - pfdietz 3mo ago
      Customers are willing to spend more money on it. How else do you define value?

matt_eeee 3mo ago

Sounds great until Epic realises they can charge whatever they like in licensing fees.

bsanders343 3mo ago
Unity tried that and lost a lot of good will. Not sure it really mattered in the grand scheme though.
maccard 3mo ago
The license agreement with Epic contains an explicit term that doesn’t allow them to retroactively change the licensing retroactively for an engine version. You might find that you can’t upgrade to VNext, but a rug pull isnt really on the cards.

wnevets 3mo ago

> It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity This has been the objective of the tech industry for years

noisy_boy 3mo ago
Employee as Kubernetes pod.
- reaperducer 3mo ago
  Cattle, not ~~pets~~ human beings. We've optimized our own destruction.
sleepybrett 3mo ago
that's the objective for all employers everywhere all the time.
Refreeze5224 3mo ago
It is a fundamental feature of capitalism. There is an inherent tension between employers and workers, in that workers represent a cost center that can never be totally eliminated, and has a lot of undesirable features, such as: being alive, having opinions, being able to talk/whistle-blow, requiring bathrooms, bathroom breaks, and safe working conditions, banding together to increase their collective power and reduce exploitation, and worst of all, necessary; you can't ever get rid of them all! The history of capitalism is the history of grappling with this inherent tension, and companies finding novel ways to deal with it. Gig work, union-busting, "right-to-work", non-competes, NDAs, return to office, employee tracking software, automation, robotics, AI, etc. The most effective trick though, was convincing the workers that they definitely don't ever need to band together, and you as an individual are definitely better off negotiating alone versus entire corporations.
- grg0 3mo ago
  > and you as an individual are definitely better off negotiating alone versus entire corporations. This sounds so comical when put that way. But you still see people defending that posture even on this forum. Psyops was definitely the most effective trick. And then those corporations went beyond the bounds of private enterprise and captured government as well. If anyone has any doubt that unchecked capitalism is fundamentally at odds with democracy, they are missing the forest for the trees.

redsocksfan45 3mo ago

[dead]

strgrd 3mo ago

This is ARC Raiders/Embark Studios. Games made by hoards of anonymous contractors and maintained by a skeleton crew incapable of iterating meaningfully on their product.

gruez 3mo ago

>It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans. Can we extend this elsewhere? Are tech companies' decision to use popular programming languages (eg. python) or software (eg. postgres) part of some dastardly ploy to make programmers "a replaceable commodity ... rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans"? Should all programmers push for having bespoke tech stacks at their companies so they can be "skilled artisans"?

hadlock 3mo ago
>so they can be "skilled artisans" Having had to work with these guys, and then maintain their software when they inevitably get bored and/or leave for more money elsewhere, no. Usually when these guys leave, their stacks/projects are the first to get rolled into the monolith and/or rewritten in the company's lingua franca (python)
corysama 3mo ago
Back in the late-90s/early 2000s boom it was not a secret that enterprise corps pushed universities to teach Java because they wanted easily-replaceable widget engineers engineering easily-replaceable widgets. On the opposite side, startups building on difficult languages like Haskell, Elixir, Erlang have a built-in bias towards hiring a team that can get a lot more done with a lot less people. Great for startups. Terrible for enterprise.
mghackerlady 3mo ago
why else do you think Javascript is used for everything these days? It's not because it's good, it's because you can teach it to a brain dead 12 year old that can then be hired to build everything from web apps to, at this rate, a very bad OS kernel

branon 3mo ago

For me this falls apart on the consumer side of things. UE5 games are manifestly lower quality than games built on custom engines. Optimization is especially worse. UE5's performance baseline _requires_ the use of upscalers (DLSS/FSR, fake/AI frames) in order to hit basic targets like 1080p@30fps. I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. Homogeneity of this type is horrible for customers of the gaming sector.

caconym_ 3mo ago
> I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. You're in an extreme minority. Also, unfortunately, Unreal is popular with indies who probably have (in general, relatively) more ethical staffing practices.
tapoxi 3mo ago
I am not a graphics engineer so I hope someone corrects me, but my understanding is that Unreal uses a deferred rendering pipeline to handle complex lighting, and deferred renderers only work with temporal anti-aliasing. The FSR/DLSS upscalers are typically superior to TSAA and are a reasonable replacement.
- kilpikaarna 3mo ago
  Deferred rendering requires a post process type antialiasing, can be TAA but also FXAA etc. It doesn't work with traditional MSAA. A lot of the UE tech is built around the assumption of TAA though.
ragequittah 3mo ago
>I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. I don't really understand making hard and fast rules like this. Clair Obscur is one of the best and most beautiful games I've ever played. The Witcher 4 has the best graphics I've seen come from a video game. Satisfactory is nuts to look at when you see an eloquent end game build. I also don't understand why people knee-jerk hate upscaling/fake frames so much. I can understand for fast-paced competitive multiplayer games, but for something like Clair Obscur where the ideal way to play is on the couch on a 4k TV give me all the upscaling and fake frames you can muster.

everdrive 3mo ago

And of course, there is really no down-side to low-wage contractors wielding UE5. /s

N19PEDL2 3mo ago

It looks exactly like what Microsoft already did to its browser engine Trident, which was replaced by Google’s Blink on Edge.

WorldMaker 3mo ago
Trident got forked/rewritten to Spartan around IE10 and IE11 defaulted to Spartan but fell back to Trident sometimes. Edge was just Spartan (and "IE11 Mode" was its hacky way embed Trident back inside Edge). It's sad that Chromium Edge still has "IE11 Mode" and situations where it keeps Trident alive, but Spartan no longer shows up anywhere. Spartan was pretty good, and obviously under-appreciated. RIP

mjr00 3mo ago

You're framing this as a thing done by a greedy corporation in an evil manner, which maybe it is, but it's also just a sign of the times. For most of the 90s and 00s, your game engine, specifically idTech in this case, was a competitive advantage. Doom and Quake/2/3 all represented massive technological jumps over their predecessors and were way ahead of their competition in terms of looks. Games like Unreal (Tournament) and Tribes competed using their engines' strengths; those engines didn't look as good but were capable of rendering much larger spaces than idTech, and those games emphasized that, e.g. Tribes' massive multiplayer maps with vehicles, or classic UT maps like Facing Worlds and Lava Giant. Then in the late 00s to 10s, things started to hit a wall. Probably peaking with Crysis in 2007, which is likely more remembered for its engine, graphics, and system requirements (all of which were truly mind-blowing at the time) than its actual gameplay. After that, games' graphics improved at a much slower rate; it started to be less about the engine's capabilities, which were increasingly homogenized, and more about art direction. Now in the 2020s, we have UE5 for AAA games with high-fidelity graphics and Unity for everything else... what is the competitive advantage in maintaining your own engine? As you mention, you have to have internal expertise, which is less well-documented than UE5/Unity because you don't have dedicated documentation staff; you have to maintain your own tooling, which is likely worse because you haven't invested as much in it. From a ROI perspective, unless you're planning on investing so you can license out the engine and become a UE5/Unity competitor, it doesn't make sense to maintain your own engine. And looking ahead, frankly, consumer GPUs are now so expensive that game graphics have likely peaked for at least a decade. There will simply not be better hardware available to gamers for the foreseeable future. Games "looking good" will be more about art style and direction, and you sadly do not need a team of game engine programmers for that.

sleepybrett 3mo ago
Man I miss tribes and tribes 2. Sadly the revival was garbage.
- shagie 3mo ago
  A nostalgia point for Tribes... There was a lan gaming place back when people had dial up... and that place had a T1 to the store that had double low double digit ping times when triple digit was common. Tribes was one of the games installed and this also had the advantage that when a few people in the store were playing it they could coordinate playing a tank much better than other players on the server. MissionForce: CyberStorm is over on GOG for another game from that publisher from that timeframe.

Lerc 3mo ago

This kind of argument has been made since the days of renderware. I have seen a number of projects go from 'We're building our own engine' To 'we should have just gone with $engine_of_the_day' To 'We were so lucky we chose to make our own engine' If you want to make a game like fortnight, the Unreal is your pick. If you want to try something that hasn't been done before you could do worse than rolling your own engine. Especially if you are looking for where the fun is, the idiosyncrasies of your own engine gives you a world with it's own flavour if you incorporate that flavour into your design process you could create a feedback loop that turns into something special.

kajman 3mo ago
> Especially if you are looking for where the fun is, the idiosyncrasies of your own engine gives you a world with it's own flavour if you incorporate that flavour into your design process you could create a feedback loop that turns into something special. I loved the old STALKER games, and the wackiness of their engines was a lot of the charm. I ended up buying the new one out of nostalgic dedication and it's probably the worst example of "Unreal slop" I've experienced, having not bought many newer games. I'm sure the butchers running Xbox have run the numbers and think they'll make even more money throwing armies of contractors with allegedly fungible skills at the next Doom games, but I'll leave others to bankroll that while I enjoy games I don't need frame generation for.
deadbabe 3mo ago
This “flavor” at the engine level doesn’t always make it back up to the end user, and even if it does, it is likely something that could have been replicated by existing engines, if developers cared enough to do it right. There are very few games where the engine is what made all the difference. Maybe something like Half Life 2 with the source engine is the exception, but ultimately, what makes a game good are traits that can be universally applicable to any engine. Truth is, it’s not that 90s anymore. Hardware has advanced to the point that you can have general purpose game engines that can be molded to any type of game. You do not need purpose built engines anymore. And someday, if you can imagine, we’ll just have AI churning out visual representation of game state, turning game development purely into a declarative data driven exercise.

jayd16 3mo ago

There's truth in the fact that it's easier to hire and ramp up on standardized tools. It's a fallacy to extrapolate that into calling a team structure completely fungible. Throwing away an effective team that was able to ship a game is an incredible waste.

whateveracct 3mo ago

it also makes your games worse. those general purpose engines all have a smell to them.

khurs 3mo ago

>It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans. Jane Street hires devs at high salaries and makes them use OCaml rather than a more mainstream language. The company makes more money trading than traditional giants like JP Morgan do. So just depends on if your strategy is right. I blame Microsoft incompetence.

inigyou 3mo ago
Isn't that the company that was found to be doing illegal market manipulation in India? I don't know if their profits are related to their devs.
- khurs 3mo ago
  One could say its a level playing field seeing as they all get caught regularly!
- dghlsakjg 3mo ago
  That's also where SBF mentored Caroline Ellison!

kevin_thibedeau 3mo ago

You could just mandate that they make an API compatibility shim. Then they can't revolt and there is reference code for interfacing with the proprietary library.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

naikrovek 3mo ago

the endless optimization of everything sure does strip out most enjoyable things, though. often it is these irreplaceable people who contribute the magic that makes their creations popular. George Fan created "Plants vs. Zombies". After the success of PvZ (the first one) PopCap fired him and replaced him with someone much cheaper. PvZ2 was horrible. All subsequent games (the ones I've played) have been awful. So, money was saved. Money was probably made by microtransactions. But no one talks about PvZ anymore. The magic was torn out for profit.

munificent 3mo ago

All of this is true and has been true for decades in the game industry. The other side of this seesaw is: Games are fundamentally in the novelty business. Players like some amount of familiarity, but they want new experiences. Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel. The flat-ish shading and floaty physics of Unity is a particularly visible example of this. So using a widely used game engine can put you at a disadvantage if you're trying to make a game that doesn't go with that grain and offers players something different. As more studios consolidate on the same engine, more players will get tired of that sameness and reward other studios more. As more studios do their own thing, players will become saturated with novelty and the benefits of not using an engine will go down. There is no stable equilibrium.

markus_zhang 3mo ago
I think there is another benefit of a custom engine — you built it to fit your workflow, so you could be extremely productive with all kinds of tools built specifically for this workflow. UE or Unity do not consider your specific cases. The problem is that companies are not willing to groom new engineers to get familiar with the code.
- formerly_proven 3mo ago
  UE is also just not a good engine. If you reduce "what is a 3D game engine" really hard it is "framework for running an input-process-output loop while consistently rendering audio and video". UE fails at the latter (factually unfixable shadder stuttering issues). A pragmatist might consider the taxonomy and say UE is therefore not a game engine. Unreal seems to be a great framework for assembling and generating content, though. Maybe Unreal Free was the metaverse all along? Meanwhile idTech certainly had issues, mostly in regards to dynamic levels, especially in older iterations, but "consistently rendering audio and video" was certainly never among them. It is well above the industry mean when it comes to the core of what a game engine is.
  - vvillena 3mo ago

anthonypasq 3mo ago

giant corporations arent interested in hiring skilled artisans or artists. it doesnt matter how skilled your team is with idTech, the chances of success for any video game are just vanishingly small and inconsistent. it feels to me like the AAA game industry is like hollywood except the budgets are higher and there are even lower chances of success. i mean theres literally multi hundred million dollar games that essentially made zero dollars. Even shitty blockbusters make some money.

_the_inflator 3mo ago

I’m with you on this, though I feel a conflict within myself: on one hand, the nostalgic attachment to that raw, "in-the-trenches" coding culture; on the other, the realization that building a proprietary engine is often completely unnecessary. Diminishing marginal utility. Why did the PC ultimately kill the demoscene? A lack of restrictions; hardware was no longer the bottleneck that — through brilliant programming exploiting specific hardware quirks — could be coaxed into conjuring up magical visual effects (or failing to do so). On the C64 and Amiga 500, individual ingenuity correlated directly with visual output. The PC era—ushered in by the i386, refined by the i486DX, and popularized by the 586 (Pentium)—increasingly abstracted visual effects and audio illusions away from the hardware itself. What previously had to be created in assembly language (!) — indeed, practically forced into existence through sheer effort — was now reduced to just "Yet Another Feature." The partnership between Carmack — whose genius was brilliantly complemented (and even surpassed, a fact often forgotten) by Michael Abrash — represented the most important development duo in the history of game engines. Ken Silverman was a sensation who, unfortunately, never quite reaped the accolades he deserved. Interestingly, this highlights exactly why it was so right and important for Carmack and his peers to be their own bosses: success doesn't end up in someone else's pockets. Nowadays, making games is essentially akin to video editing — dependent on NVIDIA, and nothing more. The crucial factor is the ability to deploy a game across countless systems with minimal adaptation effort; while the base version suffers little visual degradation, the architecture must still allow for high-end PC systems to push the boundaries. In other words: back then, we hand - coded animations—graphics, code, and music were a unified whole. Today, a kid on an iPhone creating a TikTok video achieves — with a thousand times higher quality — what used to take teams weeks or months to accomplish. Development costs are astronomical; code no longer needs manual optimization because compilers are inevitably better at it (multi-core, etc.). Nothing is one-dimensional or linear anymore. For this reason, content is all that remains. As someone who is nostalgic — a C64 demoscener and occasional Amiga 500 assembly coder — I do feel a twinge of wistfulness; yet, as a former senior manager and platform product lead, I cannot fathom clinging to the wrong approach for so long. That misguided romanticism made me shake my head. Visually, Doom was clearly inferior to engines like Unity. I couldn't care less whether or not that commented-out line containing the `0x5F3759DF` hack was in there somewhere. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

javier2 3mo ago

This mostly only makes sense if you dont already have a workable game engine. Basing your entire company on UE5 is a risk in itself, but also from the product you make your money selling: Every UE5 game kind of feels the same as every other, so it also means you put a low value in your product experience.

Kapura 3mo ago

This is why i chop down all the peach trees at the end of a harvest. If they get too big they might start wanting more water and fertilizer; it's much simpler to treat them as interchangeable saplings.

hypercube33 3mo ago

Thing is the idtech (Quake) engines power basically everything, so having them on the same branch of your company that does games that use this engine is something powerful. That said I think idtech was anti-microsoft in that it was based on non-DirectX tech from the get-go. Either way, big loss here, was hoping to see a new cutting-edge Doom or Quake game come out in 2026/7

rapind 3mo ago

Sure, but then you need to worry about other things, like Unity a few years ago with their "Runtime Fee" debacle.

socratic_weeb 3mo ago

>could do bad things like ask for more money Asking for a raise is a bad thing? Lol your average Silicon Valley sociopath

andsoitis 3mo ago

> It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans. Movies are made by a temporary team of skilled artisans who are masters of their craft. After the project, they move one. Games seem to fit within the same creative category as movies. So I wouldn't expect a company with a fixed set of artisans.

zkmon 3mo ago

This is true for any product in general. It is same as vendor lock-in in a sense, with the specialist team being the "vendor". Management never likes indispensable teams that limit their control over shuffling as they like.

flohofwoe 3mo ago

True and this 'business strategy' has been going on for at least two decades, but this sort of hire-and-fire team-recycling also means that your games will look and feel exactly the same as any other game and all creativity and uniqueness is going down the gutter since cultivating that makes no 'business sense'. And then game companies wonder why people stick to the classics and indie games ;)

maxglute 3mo ago

I don't know if heresay, but there's post on reddit alleging Id reluncant to share engine tech with other divisions at Xbox, if true, probably doesn't help, not just for MS gaming studios. I imagine every big software conglomerate wants their own inhouse engine for digital twinning / industry etc.