Upon reading your comment I just booted quake3 in q3dm17 nightmare mode and immediately started having a blast. Was about to win the match but a bot took both the rail gun and the quad damage, it was a blood bath.
My favorite was rail brushing people off during pad jumps. Because they died from hitting the level box, they would get a -1. At work we had a match where every other player had a negative score. That aid, they were good sports about it and I didn't do it all the time.
I never liked this map and don't get its popularity. Same for the one in UT99 with the two towers on an asteroid. They're just too brainless and chaotic for my taste.
I think it's their first big test of a layoff? Am interested to see how this plays out.
In any case, WoW has been stagnating for quite some time even before the merger. The devs act as though everything is slow because it needs to be. Classic+ could've been much better.
Do you think having a union means the entire organization can't get shitcanned? Ask all those auto workers whose jobs got shipped to Mexico over the years how much being unionized helped.
I both completed and enjoyed Skin Deep, but liked Blendo's previous game "Quadrilateral Cowboy" a fair bit more. They're not the same sort of game, but both are quite stylish and both use id Tech 4.
The relationship was different. When Id licensed an engine, they threw the code code over the fence, and games that used it often heavily modified the engine for their purpose. In contrast Epic put a ton of effort into making the UT engine a polished development tool for creating games.
early idtech engines were used in lots of games. Since Bethesda bought them they stopped licensing the engine to outside companies. However, Bethesda games could and did still use idtech.
There's no real evidence in here that the IDTech team or the "coders" were specifically let go. I'm not saying it didn't happen but the article is just raging at the idea of it happening without presenting any evidence of it.
I can't help but think the industry will be better off in a few years after this Xbox "restructure." That's a lot of knowledge and talent that's no longer stuck in 14 layers of middle management hell.
I hope the industry will be in a better place in a few years. There is this recurring theme of big companies rolling up little developers and destroying their development culture.
> There is this recurring theme of big companies rolling up little developers and destroying their development culture
Why are the little devs selling to the big companies in the first place then? If you’re crushing it as an Indie studio why wouldn’t you stay that way knowing how big tech acts?
Because big companies can spend way more on marketing than you.
If a big company decides to make a game very similar to yours, they can make theirs win by throwing more money into marketing than you can. Do you want them to spend that marketing budget on your competition or on you?
Here’s what Tim Schafer said about selling Double Fine to Microsoft at the time:
> "I think it's perfect for us, because we can just focus on doing our inspired weird games, and not worry about how we're going to get our next deal. We aren't chasing down our next funding and thinking about how many more months of funding we have all the time."
"Little devs" in this context is still a company that probably has investors, investors that can push for the acquisition. Even if a small dev studio is self funded or has normal debt that they can realistically pay off, the money on the table for the owner is hard to resist. If the owner has qualms, the whole pitch of "we'll give you artistic independence and the funds to make what you want" will seal the deal.
The only people that can tell Microsoft to gargle their gonads are already rich as fuck or have a will of steel and principles uncommon with entrepreneurs.
The industry could have been in a better place already if the DOJ hadn't allowed Microsoft to buy up all these studios.
I have near zero hope we'll see any meaningful antitrust action in the future either without a complete overhaul of the incentives in politics.
Xbox div's annual revenue is $23 billion. Its big enough to be its own company and sit upper-mid pack of the F500 on its own. It'd be the number 3 or 4th top gaming company globally, beating out Nintendo even. No reason for Microsoft to not have been broken up by now, let alone have been allowed to buy all the studios they did. Don't forget they also mislead the FTC to convince them to allow the Activision/Blizzard acquisition to go forward, and then once allowed laid off 1900 employees, mostly admin/HR & support, forcing it to integrate into Microsoft gaming and operate less independently.
I’d love to blame collective internet myopia on bots, just as I’d love to blame leaded gas for the mental state of geriatric politicians, but in my heart I don’t buy it.
> The industry could have been in a better place already if the DOJ hadn't allowed Microsoft to buy up all these studios.
Yes, but it's not the DOJ's job to tell Microsoft when they're lighting their money on fire. There's no unfair competition from this kind of thing. It wasn't any different when leather companies or old media would buy up studios and run themselves out of business.
Microsoft buying out studios could be anti-competitive, but Microsoft would have to not be Microsoft.
The acquisitions don't have to be successful to run afoul of antitrust laws or to be anticompetitive. Slash and burn often does violate the law.
Firing thousands of people and closing studios reduces the overall capacity of the industry to produce diverse, competing games. Just because Microsoft is Microsoft and is incompetent doesn't mean the rest of the industry and consumers don't lose out on what those independent studios could have created on their own.
In terms of antitrust/whether the FTC should have allowed the mergers is purely predictive. Microsoft looking like idiots from it has no bearing on whether the behavior of buying them up itself is anticompetitive.
I could see it being anticompetitive if it benefited Microsoft products.
Ex: if Microsoft buys out office competitors or webmail competitors to shut them down, because those customers are going to be likely to buy more Microsoft stuff.
Buying games studios could be anticompetitive if Microsoft were going to keep them alive and make their output platform exclusive (but iirc they made a commitment not to do that). It could be anticompetitive if they were going to kill them and funnel consumers into their games with continuing development... It could also be anticompetitive if Microsoft were going to give these studios some uberengine secret access to Xbox/Windows that allowed them to make the best games that outside studios couldn't come close to...
But what's happened is Microsoft is killing the studios; all at once is a surprise, but death within like 3-7 years could be predicted. Most of those people will pop up again at other studios or start new studios. Some of them will realized gamedev sucks and do something else. This is the lifecycle of studios purchased by corporate overlords. When key people make enough from the purchase to allow significant but not complete creative freedom, they often make some really good games at their next venture. Too little freedom -> pump out sequels or gacha games; too much freedom -> interesting games that don't end up being much fun.
And I'm not sure I share your optimism that the industry will be better. It might not be worse, because it's possible that Microsoft is just so dysfunctional that id would never be allowed to produce another good game anyway. But the people losing their jobs here might be financially better off just leaving the game industry entirely. In particular, if the engine devs were totally cut, it's not clear to me that there's room for a studio to differentiate itself with a custom engine in the modern day.
> There's no real evidence in here that the IDTech team or the "coders" were specifically let go
Scott Miller said it himself:
> Big day today at Id Software [...] today, Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go [...] With literally the best of the best coders in the industry.
I like Scott Miller but he doesn't work there and "insider" information after layoffs is almost always part of a PR game by one side or the other. Again, not saying he is wrong, just that a tweet from someone secondhand really doesn't do it for me as evidence anymore.
We might not hear much on that until tomorrow, since most iDTech development was out of the Frankfurt studio. If they're shutting down Frankfurt, it'd be worth getting antennae out.
Looking at LinkedIn, I see mostly people from tech (design tooling, game AI, QA), art (modeling, mats, UI, character), design (levels, gameplay), and production roles in DFW being cut, but haven't seen engine roles or Frankfurt-based employees.
It’s painful to watch this because the recipe for success at Microsoft is so obvious. They’ve just been fumbling the ball for so many years that it’s catching up to them.
And the thing is they’re not unprofitable. Gutting their studios and technology development isn’t going to help growth, it’s going to contract the business.
Growth over a long period of time involves two things: consistency in vision, and willingness to take risks.
We do not have a market designed to reward these things, at least not for the likes of Microsoft. For them, it's far easier to simply cut people while collecting on their previous labor. Once the product of that previous labor is no longer as valuable, it can then simply be spun off or shut down permanently.
> consistency in vision, and willingness to take risks.
Agreed. If you are looking at a chart of performance and it's flat or slightly increasing year over year for a few years, you're not doing great. You need to see some dips which means you tried and failed. Without those, you won't ever see the big jumps.
In my experience, once organizations have enough history and size, they can't just pivot. Whatever happens within MS the organization makes it impossible for them to become anything other than what they've always been.
Their MO will always be EEE and they'll always (attempt to) abuse their monopoly power, while giving corpos and consumers just a glimmer of hope to keep them strung along...
Also any company they acquire will be gutted until it looks like the rest of the org.
margins can't be compared to interest rates, because it's comparing revenues against costs. Comparing that with interest rates yields nonsensical results. If you want a proper comparison, you'd need return on capital, which requires you to figure out how much capital is in the gaming division.
Enjoy death threats for the rest of your life and longer. Art Modell croaked over a decade ago and you can still feel the vitriol when listening to Browns fans talk about him.
> The glass cliff is a phenomenon described by psychologists Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam, in which women are more likely to break the "glass ceiling" (i.e. achieve leadership roles in business and government) during periods of crisis or downturn when the risk of failure is highest.
She's a corporate executive. Maybe she's not willing to crash the business and take a golden parachute, but if so she's one of a vanishingly small crowd. I would personally bet that she's willing to slash and burn just like other corpos are.
Why villainize her specifically? Seems like the whole division has been in limbo for a decade. Maybe there are good reasons, I am uninformed on the matter, but hesitant whenever a woman gets run over in tech fora.
That's my question reworded: she wound up being in charge of this particular sinking ship at this particular point in time. Did she hole it below the waterline personally or no?
Does it matter? The one person who takes responsibility for what occurs in a huge organization like Xbox is the person driving the ship. What's done is done. She is responsibile for the layoffs, whether they were made necessary by her or not. She is responsible for choosing to fire the idTech Director of Engine Tech. She owns all of it, because that is literally her job as CEO. Boo hoo her predecessor made terrible decisions too.
No, but it doesn't mean the opposite will either. Some solutions are orthogonal and in reality commenters online have no idea what to do in these sorts of business situations and therefore resort to making pithy statements.
I know these other commenters gave you a non-answer but my reply to you further up the thread is hopefully more of a tangible example of the strategy Xbox should be taking.
Some of that is potentially 5-10 years too late, but even with the pessimism around new consoles I think Microsoft could still reset their fortunes with new console hardware and new exclusive games as the anchor.
The next Xbox shouldn't just be a box that's equivalent to a PC or a PS6, it should have something unique, the kind of uniqueness that Nintendo has delivered with every new console. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but when it works, it works.
The next Xbox should launch out of the gate with 1-2 must-have games, completely exclusive. Can't get them on PC, can't get them on PlayStation or Switch, GamePass on Xbox console only.
This is more easily justified if the Xbox hardware is truly unique. "Sorry, we can't put this experience on PC or PlayStation, because only Xbox can do XYZ"
We should put you at the head of a company as clearly you know so much about it. It's not as if these other people haven't tried the same thing and turns out they make no money instead. These "pretty simple" solutions sound good, don't work, as they say.
Timely releases of existing IP. Halo, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, etc, all spend way too long in the oven considering how much studio talent Microsoft has. For example, instead of making Avowed and Outer Worlds, Microsoft should have had Obsidian make the next Elder Scrolls and Fallout games while Bethesda worked on Starfield.
The fact that Microsoft has a studio making Fallout knockoffs while they own the Fallout IP is insane.
Put more effort into having pot sweeteners that get you off competing platforms and onto theirs. As it stands there’s no reason not to buy Microsoft’s games on PlayStation, PC, or Switch where Sony presumably captures 30% of the sale price.
The Xbox Ally hardware is way too late and way too niche. It should have had the operational friendliness of the Nintendo Switch, come out 5 years ago, and been first party hardware instead of a co-branded item.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know how things work in your country, but here in europe union sets minimum wage for a position/skill level.
If you work more, you get paid more in overtime pay, if you are more skilled, usually you have higher wage.
And atleast in my work, everyone is paid more than minimum.
To be fair, at this point in my life I think unions are a net positive and probably the most effective protection workers have from predatory management, but the 25 year old libertarian take on this is issue is based on things like unions lobbying states to require licensure. Restricting entry obviously benefits incumbents, which is the very definition of gatekeeping, and it would have specifically hampered a self-taught engineer like myself.
There are enough cases of unions protecting bad actors (cops, prison guards) or lazy, tenured individuals that it's easy for a mildly privileged autodidact to decide they don't need the hurdle - or the help.
If you are in a right-to-work state and you don't join the union, then union members know you're benefiting from the union without contributing back. Historically, this leads to an uncomfortable work situation for you.
If you are not in a right-to-work state, and the collectively-bargained contract involves a union membership requirement - which is typical? - then you have to join the union if you want the job.
This is where the gatekeeping concern comes from.
> I can't see any disadvantage for the employees in joining a union.
Unions have dues, so you're giving up part of your salary for membership in the union. If the union salary is equal or less than you would be able to negotiate on your own, it's a disadvantage for you.
In the devils advocate position. The union is a club you join with dues paid every month, in the sort of vague hope this will get you greater bargaining power with the employer. And it mostly works but there are downsides. If there is any meritocracy left in the corporation it is sucked out, replaced by seniority, that is, the only people that get ahead are those too stupid to leave. You have to maintain a bunch of useless leeches in the union administration. and when the company does poorly it tends to implode violently under the labor burden rather than be able to scale down. (everybody loses their job rather than just a few)
Former IT union leader. It really depends on the union because every contract is unique to the bargaining group and employer.
Traditional blue collar seniority, set wages, and hyper specific job roles simply won't work in knowledge work. So there tend to be higher severance payouts in lieu of seniority promotions, pay bands with equity review instead of pay steps, and very flexible job roles.
I think a lot of folks see unions from their youth working in construction or service work, which have a lot of corrupt "company unions" which mandate hour caps and shit benefits for part timers.
Realistically IT workers with leverage like ourselves need to think of unions as contract insurance. You already have a contract, the collective agreement can be as broad as possible to allow the flexibility to respect individual contributors, while the pooled dues are put towards eventual contract enforcement.
My first IT job gave me quite a surprise when they ripped up my contract and said "so sue us." That's the day I found out how much a labour lawyer hourly rate costs. 10 years later as a union leader I started signing the sizable cheques to our law firms, there's always a bad manager somewhere causing a lawsuit...
One way unions negotiate higher pay is to make sure the pool of qualified workers is restricted. Ie. Lobby for laws that a specific qualification is required, and then set caps on the number of places to earn that qualification.
Industries with high levels of unionization tend to have lower turnover, which can be good for employees already inside, but can make it harder for new employees to join. They also can have various rules, like seniority, that take precedence over other forms of promotions (whether meritocratic or not). Unions are also inherently political where membership voting, with all the internal dealing, agreements, possible corruption, drama, etc that entails causing issues.
Not all unions are the same. There are absolutely unions that are as bad as the naysayers say, but there are also ones that you rarely hear about that just quietly chug along with decent enough relationships with employers.
That being said, the appeal to me is minimal. I like working for small to medium sized companies where I can enjoy the flexibility of what tech stacks I work on. While the idea of some sort of optional trade union that could cover me for benefits, legal fights, contract enforcement, and maybe extra job insurance is appealing, nothing like that exists where I live. I have gotten healthy severances in the past due to knowing the rights I have in my jurisdiction, but that also means having the will and ability to hire a lawyer.
I'm in my mid 40s and rode the wave of a workers market over the last 2 decades. I'm still in demand, too. It's not quite as easy as it was 5+ years ago, but AI hasn't replaced me, though I'm actually "supervising" its work from an experienced angle. From that perspective I'm just a lot more productive.
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.
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.
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.
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"
Unions also many times (especially with "guild" type unions) can serve other valuable functions like guaranteeing a higher minimum quality of work (generally).
Guild-style unions seem to be about setting and enforcing cartel pricing, not work quality. At least for the construction and remodeling subcontractors I encounter.
> Also, no union employees at Blizzard were impact by Microsoft's Xbox layoffs/restructuring.
It might have to do with the unionisation, but I wouldn't be surprised that its just that Blizzard is like one of the like 4 money makers that MS still has in the gaming division and that is why they were spared.
Sorry but the last people in the game industry that should be complaining are Blizzard. It's been what, a decade? since they've released a new property? How many Hearthstone card packs and Diablo 4 expansions can they milk out of customers before they finally just shut the whole thing down.
I know it's cliche, but what are the thousands of people that work there doing all day?
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.
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.
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...'
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.
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.
Try actually playing a modern Doom game and then a modern UE5 game or look at some benchmarks. UE games mostly run like shit, whereas Doom/idTech games are the smoothest in the entire industry.
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.
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.
> 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.
No one is as sure of their negotiating position as the software dev / temporarily embarrassed founder who thinks they’re special and the bestest and better than everyone else exactly like them.
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.
>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"?
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
For me, the hard-and-fast ruleset is implemented from an ideological perspective rather than a technical one. Stipulated, UE5 games can be fun and certain genres suffer less from upscaling than others.
Fact remains though, that homogeneity and monoculture in tech is bad. Not being able to properly render all the frames of the product I paid for (without burning thousands of dollars and hundreds of watts of waste heat -- and sometimes not even then!) is worse.
I refuse to believe that upscaling is a solution to any existing problem, because I remember when we didn't have to do that. I want to render ALL the frames. Hardware is so powerful now, there should be no excuse.
The only reason I will accept upscaling is as a power-consumption strategy to be employed while on battery. For upscaling to be required for any other reason represents a failure somewhere in the game development process. I won't pay for failures, especially when it costs me yet more money in hardware to run the failure-enabling technology.
I'm not talking about playing 4k@60fps native and I'm not railing against system requirements. I get modern games require modern hardware, but the ratio of what's required to run UE titles now is skewed by an order of magnitude. Simultaneously, it feels like lowend (or even midrange) optimization has been completely forgotten.
I also think that by using something like UE or Unity, you're necessarily deprioritizing a decent chunk of the "game development" process. Instead you are first participating in cottage-industry dynamics as a business strategy, with all gamedev-related decisions relegated as subordinate to your chosen business partner(s).
Additionally - and I'm getting into conspiracy theorist territory here a little bit - I believe (to an extent) that a lot of these games are made with "cutting-edge" technologies mostly as fodder to propel the industry "forward" by whatever means necessary.
By this I mean: producing the "Next Great Photorealistic Game" (which looks/plays mostly the same as the previous year's photorealistic game but requires NVIDIA's new $2,000 graphics card to run) props up AMD and NVIDIA by requiring their latest generation of hardware. It enriches Epic Games by requiring their latest engine with new features. It encourages studio consolidation because now you need an entity like Microsoft to bankroll development if you want any hope of competing in the AAA space.
All of this works because there's a decent contingent of consumers who can be relied upon to purchase whatever comes out, no questions asked. And that's fair! If it's fun, then it's fun right?
But looking at where we're at and where we're going versus where we came from clashes with my ideology and makes it unfun to me personally.
I'm willing to believe some of this comes off as arrogant or elitist (not a gamedev, no real perspective), but these are my honest thoughts, and are how I inform the purchasing decisions I make as a consumer.
So I read a lot of ideological takes like this about video games. My take: gamers take their hobby way too seriously. Maybe I'm just out of the loop but I never hear this kind of talk about music, movies, books, or really anything else. You listen to the music you think sound good, watch movies that look interesting. I'm of the same mindset with video games.
EA being bought by the Saudis and people taking a hard "moral stance" to not purchase any further EA games is another example. I've got a bridge to sell you if you think you're boycotting everything (even every video game) that's making the Saudis money. I dislike EA for other reasons and their products tend to be bland but if they make a good game I'm going to reward the developers of that game so they hopefully make further good games.
And in terms of the conspiracy theory the engine is an engine. Developers choose what to implement and can tone down all the crazy new tech as much as they want. They can also write custom stacks to do things no other Unreal Engine game would do. Unreal actually scales pretty well in that regard. Current minimum specs for Satisfactory is an i5-3570K and 1650 GTX. Recommended video card is a 2070 RTX. I have a 15 year old computer sitting in a closet that can play the game fairly well. There's so many great indie titles out there that if I only had that 15 year old computer I'd be spoiled for choice. But IMO we also need bleeding edge games to move the needle forward and keep the industry exciting. I want crazy tech in my video game that makes my jaw drop like the trailers for Witcher 4 do right now. That keeps 100s of millions of people watching things like The Video Game Awards.
In terms of homogenization I see the exact opposite happening. You probably have a slew of games to play right now that all use different engines. I myself have a backlog I don't think I can get through in my lifetime that's going to grow immensely this September. There's so many games being released and they're made in so many different ways that saying there's homogenization seems strange. Right now I'm hopping between Death Stranding 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Terratech Legion, and Resident Evil Requiem. Where is the monoculture? The idea of not giving TerraTech Legion a chance simply because the devs used unreal seems wrong.
The music sounds good? I listen to the music. The book is well written? I buy the book. The game is fun? I buy the game. You could spend your whole life nit-picking reasons why X publisher is bad, X record label is the worst (and in both cases most ARE) but in the end these companies will still make ungodly amounts of money and you're just making life less enjoyable for yourself.
> UE5's performance baseline _requires_ the use of upscalers (DLSS/FSR, fake/AI frames) in order to hit basic targets like 1080p@30fps.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "baseline", but the most recent UE5 game I've played that pretty consistently gets better than your "basic target" is The Last Caretaker (TLC). For me, it always did better than your target in the starting area, through to the point where you embark on your main quest. Prior to that, I played a whole lot of Satisfactory, which ran much, much better than TLC.
I run without AA, "upscaling", or frame hallucination. I'm using a Radeon RX 9070 on Linux, and spent most of my Satisfactory playtime with a Radeon 5700 XT.
That's a ridiculously biased and short sighted opinion.
UE5 is just an evolution of UE4 and the early adopters suffer from being early adopters. Beyond that there is a skill issue in studios shipping less than ideal performances on time constraints.
UE5 is a marvel of modern technology from all angles.
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
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.
I don’t think unreal engine games play and look as well as custom engine games. Like doom or cyberpunk. If you open cyberpunk without rtx etc. It really really looks good and also plays very well.
Also there is obviously a massive gap between how games look and what the hardware is capable of. Cyberpunk runs better than total war attila on my computer as an example.
Don’t write a database, don’t write a compiler, don’t write an os, don’t write a game engine… are we all supposed to write web apps at this point?
This mindset didn’t create what we have today and won’t create what we will have tomorrow. I recommend people that like building these things to ignore this pov as much as possible
UE5 can make a great and efficient game actually - its more about how you use it. And because its huge and popular and accessible there are a ton of developers using it very inefficiently.
That can be true for any commodity software though. Designing something inhouse means you inherently will have engineers and experts with better low level understanding. It doesnt mean it will be better (could even be much worse) but theres a tradeoff there.
Yes. You basically still need a few engine programmers to use UE5 efficiently, even if it's not your own engine. UE5 seems to be user friendly enough that most of the game development can be carried out just by artists and game designers, but without engine programmers performance optimization will be poor.
The core part of UE5 that people seem to forget is that it's FREE. During development you pay Epic exactly 0 dollars and even after launch you need to make very decent sales figures to actually pay anything at all.
So a lot of studios think oh, the engine is already finished, we just need artists and designers to use it, all the heavy lifting has already been done. And while yes, you can make a game that way, the results will be sub optimal. But then again, free is infinitely cheaper than having an engine team maintaing your own engine or any custom elements of UE.
This is correct. It is entirely possible for both the archetypal blood-sucking MBA and the pragmatic industry veteran to reach the same conclusion for different reasons.
The build vs. buy calculus in game dev has been steadily shifting over the past 15 years, and when CD Projekt Red announced they were adopting UE5 for their next Witcher game, the writing was on the wall.
That said, Id could make a bold "commoditize your complements" move and open-source the latest, now last, IdTech. What Godot is to Unity, IdTech could be to Unreal Engine.
I think their use of 3rd party libraries could prevent them from releasing it as open source. This even happened to the original DOOM 1 and their use of the DMX library that they had to rip out the sound support entirely.
Looking at the start-up of Doom Dark Ages (with new expansion today), they list Havok, Oodle, Bink, and SpeedTree. Looking at Havoc's website, that already starts at 50k$ alone.
Ok, so what has happened historically when we hold a tech stack constant for 10 years? Versioning proceeds, but everyone consolidates on a thing?
Python? => Data science. Sure, python is just importing the C tools that do the heavy lifting, but look me in the eye and tell me R, S, SAS, or SPSS won.
C? => I mean, everything? But what happened in the first 10 years? Proliferation of operating systems and linear algebra libraries?
So, generally, the grey beard talent consolidates their intellectual contributions and uplift everyone else. Is that true? -ish? Missing the mark?
Guys, I'm a knuckle-dragger, I genuinely don't know what I'm asking. What are the tech stacks that were held constant (by whatever factors) for a decade, and what came out of it?
Is this the decade where art directors takes over gaming?
"Is this the decade where art directors takes over gaming?"
Considering the bad performance of the division can probably be blamed on the art and game designers, probably not. More than likely, the gaming industry is going to atomize. Meaning many very small companies, and fewer big studios. Alienating your audience isn't exactly a career enhancing move. And that's ultimately what triggered all of this and the move towards smaller (non AAA) games.
As a former AAA dev, this is spot on. At the end of the day, games are a business. Margins are not attractive and competition is fierce as the barrier to game development has lowered with Steam: both are downward pressures on wages.
After entering games with naive expectations of the wild west of the 90s, I would recommend other programmers not enter the AAA space, if compensation and job security are concerns. Indie game development looks like great fun, but don't expect any low-latency programming.
It’s a little simpler than that. The games that use this engine have poor sales and no one is even buying idTech. There isn’t any reason to keep them around when Microsoft is losing 64 cents on every dollar. They chopped every unprofitable studio and cast several to their own budgets. Presumably they are going to sell off the mediocre studios and IP.
> what is the competitive advantage in maintaining your own engine?
It's still a product-distinguishing decision you can make at the indie scale. What I mean is, you can create an engine that allows you to get the performance + aesthetic that otherwise would not be possible. i.e. Specialize in a profitable niche.
And if hardware costs keep ballooning, performance will become more important.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
I disagree, I think there's an over-emphasis on generating high quality individual frames and a expectation of what it is you should be able to do in games.
You can have a game that is photorealistic but you turn around and have your gun barrel poke into the wall and disappear. How many games can you throw enough junk into a river and make it change course eroding a new path for itself as it goes?
Some games rely on clear specific rules of an engine for the player to know because the rules are an integral part of the game, and any inconsistency in implementation creates a feeling of being cheated. Often you can implement such things in standard engines, but you are working against them the entire way.
You could have a game where a player sees a pylon and knows that because it is made of metal you could melt one of the legs and make it fall over. but to do that the entire construction of the game rules are integrated into the world. Most games teach the player that things like pylons are static objects unless they need to be destroyed for a plot point in which case just this one is different. Perhaps the player just has to learn that pylons are one of the class of destroyable things. Making emergent properties goes engine deep.
>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.
And therein lies the problem. A game engine is game state. You can make it pretty any number of ways, The engine will still be the thing deciding what you can do, and it is the things you can do that makes it play.
>There are very few games where the engine is what made all the difference.
Maybe if you ignore the entirety of the retro gaming scene where people are using old engines and modified old engines because they bring along a lot of the feel and expected behavior.
The average modern Unreal and Unity game feels like shit, but some dev's can pull off making new engines behave like old ones we love. It requires a lot of work. Just look at New Bloods catalog of games that pulled it off. DUSK (unity), Amid Evil (UE4), Ultrakill (Unity). Each one of those games had a lot of passion behind them driving for gameplay perfection in the style of a retro game and/or engine.
It could still compete with Unreal! If this really is the end of the line for IdTech, ZeniMax should gift the whole thing to the Blender Foundation. I would pitch it as:
- Huge tax write-off
- Commoditizes their complement
- If it succeeds, ultimately lowers the cost of triple-A game dev
RenderWare was quite a special case that made trust in third party engines go down significantly since EA closed it to external customers just as the PS3 hit (Renderware kind-of saved the PS2 since it was "complicated" in the same ways as the PS3 but having a middleware enabled many smaller developers to focus on their games).
Engines has been (And is to a large extent) bad business because unless you really do something _really special_ it's way expensive for little gains (especially if you're targeting realistic games since there is so much to focus on before even considering portability).
And I say this as someone who started out working on custom engines (but am out of the business outside of hobby stuff).
Realistically speaking, how hard is it to vibe code an engine these days? Unreal is source available and I am willing to bet the source code has been used to train AI models. And there are genuine open source projects like Godot that can be used as a foundation, license permitting (or not). The bigger moat seems to be all the tooling around the actual engine.
I didn't try that hard but I did not have much success. I spent some time trying to vibe code a forward clustered renderer in vulkan and I couldn't manage to get anything I was too happy with. Mostly just regurgitation of a few different tutorials. It's possible I'm just too dumb to use AI and it was also 18 months ago, so things have progressed on the LLM front.
Vibe coding an engine is way harder than vibe coding something onto an existing engine. It’s something I have worked on for fun in my free time.
I have the ability to make the engine I’m making on my own, but trying out AI for the experience. It really sucks in ways that make it good for what an engine needs. A good engine needs to plan pretty far ahead and plan well at high architecture level. AI is actually awful at that despite it being okay at making plans at implementing said plan.
I’m new to game dev and been developing a 3D engine for my game after dabbling with Godot.
I read a lot of opinions on whether it is a good idea and it all boiled down to ‘my god, no, don’t write your engine. That said, I did and I am sure glad I did invest 3 years on a framework I know like the back of my hands’ and that told me exactly what I wanted to hear.
It’s like the whole AI debacle, really. If your goal is to ship a product, go with a premade engine. If your goal is to enjoy the craft and learn how stuff works, and you got that itch to do it the difficult way, then roll your sleeves and dive in. It’s always a pleasure to play a game with a completely unique feel.
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.
Jane Street hires devs at high salaries and makes them use OCaml rather than a more mainstream language. The company make more money trading than traditional giants like JP Morgan do.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, I think it's widely regarded as engine limitations even when people continually claim it's up to individual game devs to optimize their games.
If that were the case then why do nearly all UE5 games suffer from the same engine stutter issues. And to OPs point, even if it can be optimized away, why isnt the engine in a state where the baseline performance for realtime rendering does not exhibit these stutter issues on the majority of games.
Unreal’s limitation is that it doesn’t know how a shader will be used until it actually tries to render it on the target hardware. This is a trade-off to gain flexibility and rendering performance. The engine has to compile shaders on the fly when it is first used, which is fine if the shader is simple, but nowadays that usually is not the case.
There are ways to make a player’s PC compile shaders before realtime play begins, but it takes some setup and smaller devs might not know how to do it. This is most likely the reason why stuttering happens.
On fixed hardware targets (consoles, Steam Deck) you can ship precached shaders as you know everything about the target hardware.
Console vs PC is a red herring since UE games still stutter on consoles, people just notice that less because most games run at 30 fps anyway. You can read Unreal's own blog posts on this and they'll actually explain that this is mostly down to their material system (and game logic/scripts reaching into it) being designed to create nearly infinite shader variations on the fly in response to arbitrary world/game states. This design choice separates engines which have stutters from those which do not.
Yes, that’s what I said. Powerful and flexible, at the expense of not being able to know how it will be used ahead of time.
Bundling and precompiling is not a fool-proof guarantee but it is very effective. Most often when a game has shader stutter the developers have not bundled or allowed the shaders to compile before gameplay starts (or it’s actually some other unrelated issue). The engine doesn’t do it automatically.
> [...] people just notice that less because most games run at 30 fps anyway
This is just plainly not true anymore, as far as the current gen consoles (PS5, XBox Series X) go.
I just searched for every single PS5 game built on UE5 specifically (i.e., no UE4), which wasn't super difficult, given there are 31 of them. I might be missing a few, but that sample should be representative enough.
TLDR: 28 out of 31 UE5 games on PS5 have a performance/60fps mode, making it a ~93% share.
Or maybe...it is a good engine when configured and used properly, and many developers don't take the time to learn how to do so. There are plenty of UE games that don't have shader stuttering issues because there are plenty of things you can do to avoid shader stuttering.
UE-powered games collectively earn 20+ billion worldwide annually each year. Unity-powered games also earn 20+ billion annually. This means that each year these "bad" game engines power more revenue than every YCombinator company combined.
Meanwhile, idTech, however technically amazing it may be, is so complicated to develop for that even id Software doesn't use it for every game.
> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel.
I think this is a bit of a myth. Unreal gets this criticism a lot, but it's usually because many studios choose to stick close to the rendering defaults, which does lead to a certain look.
To that point, it's probably a lot cheaper to configure Unreal or Unity into a unique "grain" than it is to develop your own engine. It's also possible to use custom physics instead of those built into the engine.
Yeah but afair UE5 Nanite + Lumen + Megalights + whatever is meant to work together, you can't just replace or turn off one of them without it affecting the others.
So your choices are to tweak the defaults (which are not bad, but generic and the same as everybody else's), or rebuild the whole renderer (like ARC raiders did for example)
You can mix and match to some extent, though Nanite, Lumen and Megalights are intended to work together. Megalights really needs Lumen, and Lumen works best with Nanite.
There’s the whole forward renderer path you can use instead, which works well on lighter hardware. Or you can use baked lighting instead of Lumen, and some people have created other realtime GI systems as plugins.
You can’t really change the material-shader pipeline though without overhauling the entire engine.
There are also a ton of parameters and configuration options you can change. These can be quite obscure and this is where small studios struggle.
You don’t need to flat out replace the render pipeline to get a wildly different look, a single new native render pass is very achievable (and if you have the skills to write your own renderer you absolutely have the skills to modify Unreal’s)
I can pick out a creation engine game from a mile away. Engine "Grain" is a real phenomenon. Same for UE5. There's just something about the lighting and the FPS 'feel' that is a dead giveaway.
There's only so many built-in and drop-in components available for the big engines; player movement, physics, render pipeline plumbing, UI frameworks, user settings, etc. You definitively do notice these things, if you care. It doesn't help that many devs (even AAA) keep bad defaults, so a huge chunk of Unreal games release with a comically-bad, laggy motion blur turned on.
Someone certainly could painstakingly replicate each badness of Unreal in Unity (and vice-versa), but until then, UE and Unity games often do feel like UE and Unity games. It's also rare to play a UE game that feels good and polished.
And therein lies the rub. Unreal 5 is massive and complex, and there comes a point where it takes longer to understand how to layer on your own customizations than just to start from scratch. Especially for indie developers.
I wanted to make a little editor utility (the UE editor is built in UE) that changed the way viewport selection was handled. I think I got to 5 layers of abstraction before I gave up. 5 layers, for a left-click object select.
I mean, it is and it isn’t. You picked hard mode, and Unreal’s abstractions are not always great - some things are abstracted to hell and back, others are literally hard coded and impossible to modify (hello CMC). But changing the character movement using CMC (or mover if you want), is very doable with a 30 minute YouTube video. It’s also going to be way, way less work than throwing everything out and starting from scratch. There’s always the option of implementing your own movement on the character instead of using Unreal’s.
People like to complain about the time it takes to ship AAA games and how huge the budgets have gotten... and then complain that the UE5 games all look the same. You either use some amount of systems 'out of the box' or customize/rewrite everything and burn $$$.
It's plainly ridiculous that tens of millions of dollars can flow into a game project without anyone in charge ever caring about questions like "does it feel good to walk around in?", "does it default to having a nauseating motion blur filter straight out of Overgrowth (2010)?", "does it run at 40 FPS with minimum graphical settings on a $2000 PC if I turn DLSS off?" or even just "is this fun? challenging? interesting in any other way?"
I open Microsoft Office on the web and the page reloads three times before showing me a list of files, then I open a document and it loads for 5 or 10 seconds, constantly reflowing, before eventually the entire page reloads again and eventually stabilizes, finally allowing me to browse and edit. After all of this, everything besides collaboration manages to function worse than what we had in Office 2003 two decades ago. This happened to all of software, not just Office. It happened to games, too. Delayed, over budget, underdelivered. No thanks.
> It's plainly ridiculous that tens of millions of dollars can flow into a game project without anyone in charge ever caring about questions like
You ask fair questions, but there clearly loaded. Games are like any other project, and the desired scope for games has gotten enormous. If you don’t like those games there’s more indie and AA titles being released these days than there were AAA titles 25 years ago. An awful lot of that is down to Unity and Unreal.
> does it feel good to walk around in?
This isn’t a priority for every game. A bunch of the most beloved games have absolutely awful movement mechanics. It’s very often a deliberate choice to _not_ make player movement feel like either Titanfall or TLOU (partially because it’s an incredible amount of work to do that). Some really good examples are Witcher 3, RDR2, shadow of the colossus, the entire fromsoft collection. (And notice none of those are Unreal!)
> does it default to having a nauseating motion blur filter
Motion blur is super divisive. Anecdotally what I’ve seen is that most people just don’t care and there’s a very vocal minority who disable it. We had telemetry on a previous game and the number of people who opted out was minuscule. We gave an option for on/off on first launch of the game. It helps when frame rates are teetering on the edge of our budget which is often why we enable it.
> does it run at 40 FPS with minimum graphical settings on a $2000
What games do you have in mind there?
> even just "is this fun? challenging? interesting in any other way?"
This isn’t fair. Any game I’ve worked on has had the majority of the team playing every week, and the gameplay and design teams playing more often than that. You may not like the game, and that’s fine, and some games might be more vanilla than your liking, but those games are wildly popular. Personally - I think the praise Nintendo get for a simple platformer (which has excellent controls, admittedly) is way overblown, and peoplr are willing to overlook that they’ve been shipping the same game for 20 years and charging more than most AAA games during that time frame. I also think BOTW and TOTK are wildly overrated - they’re padded out, clunky, with some of the worst mechanics in games (weapon stamina) on undercooked hardware.
But that doesn’t mean that other people can’t enjoy them.
Also AAA dev, this is true but also the original comment about “engine feel” still holds, since the whole point is studios are trying to spend less time engine wrangling, and keep to more “the Unreal way”. I’ve noticed over the last 15 years AAA studios do less custom c++ and have converted legacy home built systems to use unreal built ins more and more. It happened slowly so I didn’t notice it but in retrospect it’s really obvious.
There’s definitely some hallmarks (right click on a text box in any unreal game and I’d say there’s a 90% chance of you getting a raw slate paste action menu) - but I don’t think that defines the engine.
I think working around shader compiles is really tough in Unreal and you’ll struggle to get rid of the stutters even if you do everything you can there. But two games using chaos, UMG, niagara, GAS, and Mover can look and feel night and day different as long as that effort is put in. But it’s easy to not put that in.
> I’ve noticed AAA studios do less custom c++
Yeah - and I do think this is sad. You can take your custom C++ libraries and bolt them onto unreal quite easily, and it’s not an awful amount of work to expose an Unreal friendly API to it. 13 years ago I was tasked with replacing physx in Unreal, I can’t see (m)any studios wanting to spend 6 months on that endeavour these days.
I can tell you that the fact that id tech 6 engine games look as good as they do and pump out 200+ fps is pretty novel in a way that the massive epic games and their flagship UE5 (and no painstakingly optimized case studies one may conjure) come close to matching even a decade on. The reward for lapping the entire industry? Early retirement.
It may have been great, and lapped the entire industry, but it wasn't getting used very much, even internally at Microsoft. So how much value was really bringing?
"How much value can this bring?" Is the question that the incompetents at microslop needed to ask themselves before absorbing half the industry, not the smug justification for killing great tech after failing to capitalize on it. Specially when it brought great value to the industry for decades.
I think the big reason they get such good framerates is their conservatism with shader counts. A staff member mentions that in an interview with DigitalFoundry for Doom: The Dark Ages. I wonder if their in-house technology made such restraint easier.
Compared to other engines, making a new material asset is easy for someone less technical to do willy-nilly.
For sure, if you restrict what can (and can't) be done in shaders you can optimize buffer layouts and rendering passes, not allow things that explode shader permutations/switching or explode shader instruction count and kill occupancy.
The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials.
I think it can actually be a bit better in terms of artistic consistency to have a fixed set of materials you can work with in a given game. Very important if you want any sort of stylized rendering!
id tech is probably the last engine that used a signature game to showcase the engine to licensees. The business model of idTech, Unreal Engine, and Crytech used to be 'make amazing looking game that sells the engine to licensees'. The problem with that model was you got a cut of the game code for whatever the 'amazing looking' game was and told to figure it out. If you wanted to make a Gears of War clone then Unreal Engine 3 was perfect... for every other game genre you had to rewrite and implement huge chunks of code.
Unreal Engine managed to evolve and expand the engine to the point where it is somewhat game agnostic, crytech became lumberyard under Amazon and died, idTech became the engine solely for iD games (ie the same business model as every other game or publisher custom engine).
iD tech's rendering pipeline is focussed on the one AA game iD are publishing that year and making that one game run efficiently and beautifully on mid-high end PC and current consoles. UE5 is focussed on providing tools for anyone to (relatively) easily make good looking games and applications that can be published to a wide range of devices.
I have also been very impressed by the performance and fluidity of Doom and Doom Eternal. Even when playing from a HDD (on a computer made from leftover parts), when high res textures and geometry didn't load fast enough, the engine just showed a low res version before smoothly blending to higher res without ever stuttering. It's a minor miracle how well these games run, even on GPUs 2-3 tiers lower than most others require.
In the photography world, there's a similar story around the colour you get from straight-out-of-camera jpegs.
Unless you shoot Fuji (where their absolutely incredible film emulation engine is one of the big differentiators), most serious-ish photographers shoot raw rather than jpeg, and do their own processing after, so the sooc jpeg look is largely irrelevant.
You're right, but idTech is almost by definition that "novelty" kind of engine. And it did help id to sell more games. It's just apparently not enough.
Id made games to demo their engine. No one is going to buy an engine without any games. They don’t even sell idTech anymore. It’s used for their games which are not making any money. No game sales doesn’t support the reasoning they should keep the engine around.
Except that the obvious reason their recent games see lackluster sales is because they're on Gamepass, which precludes needing to buy the game to play it.
Yes, and those usage stats show that the overwhelming majority are playing the game without having bought it. One can't argue that these studios should be shut down for poor sales when Microsoft themselves are sabotaging the ability for these games to sell for full price.
The whole point of gamepass is that you don't buy the games. If enough people are playing it through gamepass that shows it supports the value of gamepass, if not sure that's a problem.
For whatever reason idsoft has not been licensing their engine for a long while. AFAICT it's not that "nobody's buying", it's that "they're not selling".
> 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.
Ridiculous and provably false.
It's like saying "every novel written with a typewriter tends to produce stories with a certain theme and dialog"
It isn’t like that, and it is true. Lots of games in a specific engine share common traits. From physics, to rendering, to more specific engine stuff (think of using the full suite of lumen/nanite/ue5 rendering whatever).
Even the character actor can sometimes feel similar. Visuals are by far the most indicative thing of an engine. Don’t forget about unreal’s awful shader stutters.
calling that ridiculous is extremely strange. Feel free to prove it false I guess?
Guilty Gear and Hi-Fi Rush are both Unreal 4 games and a lot of the comments in this thread are about the Lumen+Nanite ‘grain’ that seems very present in Unreal 5.
I certainly think there is was inflection point for Unreal’s inherent complexity moving to 5 that made it exponentially more difficult to customize when compared to 4 as far as implementing highly customized renderers (in particular) and overall customization in general.
> It's like saying "every novel written with a typewriter tends to produce stories with a certain theme and dialog"
Rather, it's like saying that every academic paper typeset in Latex using the stock Computer Modern font face gives off the same sort of vibe. That doesn't mean that every paper typeset in Latex has identical value, but academic papers aren't trying to sell themselves based on first impressions, whereas games are.
Not to start a linguistic rabbit hole but the correct analogy would be "a certain language and social dialect tend to produce stories with a certain theme and dialog".
>Ridiculous and provably false.
If you prefer a counterexample, a couple of years ago I noticed that Apex Legends was a Source engine game without external info, and that Source version is heavily modified. Of course one can modify the provided defaults to a point that even the most no-life individual couldn't guess the engine.
I watched a cool video about the whole "engine grain" thing recently with more examples. https://youtu.be/SOwYqwsEdXc
Yes I was just gonna comment something along these lines. We’ll see a consolidation towards UE5/6, and then a rebound effect away as gamers get tired of “unreal slop”.
> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel
There's a degree of toupee fallacy to this. It's hard to tell what engine something is on just from gameplay if the team invested in custom rendering and gamefeel.
I think it used to be more true than it is these days.
I used to be able to pick graphics/physics engine by feel alone. PhysX and Havok used to feel very different. Quake 3/Half Life/Unreal used to feel very different. But that's all largely been paved over.
> Quake 3/Half Life/Unreal used to feel very different.
Fair on the Unreal Engine part, but Quake 3 and Half-Life are basically built on sibling engines that share one direct common ancestor (though I fully agree with you that they felt different).
Quake/Quake 2 used idTech2. idTech3 for Quake 3 was built on top of idTech2, and GoldSrc for Half-Life was built on top of idTech2 as well (it was a heavily customized and modified version of it).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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 drain since cultivating that makes no 'business sense'. And then game companies wonder why people stick to the classics and indie games ;)
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.
ZeniMax, the parent holding company of Bethesda Softworks/Bethesda Games, bought iD in 2009.[1] Microsoft bought ZeniMax for $7.5B in 2020 and assigned it to the Xbox division.[2] ZeniMax's board was subsequently dissolved, so it's entirely Microsoft.[3]
If that isn't a perfect piece of antitrust evidence, how crazy is it that MS can reach across a whole industry and buy the company that bought the company that defined the games industry, with Carmack playing revenge of the nerds boy genius. Everything about it is perfect for a locally produced drama somewhere in eastern europe.
What's the development cycle of a major game? If someone worked on multiple games from start to finish for a studio, how many games would they have completed in a ten year span? Do game studios allow developers to talk about anything and eveyrthing they're working on in public or do they have them work under non-disclosure agreements?
It’s not “moving to India” so much as Western studios are now forming smaller core teams locally and farming out much of the content to outsourcing studios in India, Malaysia & Eastern Europe rather than doing it all in-house.
As someone in the industry, I have not seen this across studios.
If you farm out art, you end up with a confused set of props / designs. If you farm out code, you end up with a mess of different assumptions and patterns.
If you’re designing and considering everything, then you’re essentially running a studio but now remotely from another country.
I don’t disagree with the problems you mention, but US and European wages are high, and margins keep getting tighter and tighter.
A lead studio with a small headcount can outsource work internationally for often much cheaper than the same job done locally, but also not have to pay those workers in stages of development where there’s not enough work for them.
Typically game/media studios run on contractors because of this. You'll be hired for maybe 3-6 months on a repeating contract, so that you can be let go at a moments notice.
For businesses the labour entry point is crowded, wages therefore are low. We find it more common to hire students and pay minimally, use exposure as the negotiating tool.
I know multiple publishers who advocate for that model; outsourcing, not so much. Unless they have a trusted partner, but at that point, they're essentially acting as an arm of the publisher.
> Yet today, Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go
I feel that this is an incredibly unfair and demeaning take both towards Microsoft and towards the people being fired. As I see it, getting fired is just like being dumped by a romantic partner. It typically says very little about your value as an individual, and almost everything about their current situation and how the relationship with you fits into their future plans and the other opportunities available to them.
Yes, in this case it's a slightly different (and much more common) strategy - EEE was a bit of a Microsoft trademark but we see what's happening here much more widely, especially by massive companies as well as with PE. I'd say it'd be better described as AEE - Acquire, Enshittify, Extinguish...
I don’t think that applies here. They don’t have a monopoly on gaming, there are major competitors in the space, from Sony and Nintendo, as well as Steam/Indie devs. Buying some studios might be anticompetitive in some minor ways, for instance if you’re a huge elder scrolls or fallout fan, but there’s just too many games out there for that to possibly be a viable strategy at a macroscopic level.
Remember when Satya Nadella and Bobby Kotick got up in court and told everyone how all these giant Xbox mergers would be good for the consumer and went after Lina Khan for suggesting that maybe that wasn't the case?
Who woulda thunk they were full of crap...? (besides everyone who didn't have a financial stake in the deal)
Microsoft, one the world's greatest monopolists, bequeaths a game engine monopoly unto Epic Games, in one the biggest corporate blunders of all time.
If they were smarter about this, they would commoditize their compliment and open source the Doom The Dark Ages engine just like John Carmack did with the Quake 3 engine.
The industry is skewing heavily indie now, and there's no money in the indie game engine segment. Maybe a few AAA titles will be unhappy that Epic can negotiate more aggressively, but mostly this is a nothingburger, particularly given idTech's rep for batteries not included.
Among us made $105 million. I'd say there's plenty of money in indie, so long as your not rehashing other people's games yet again.... (Though the FPS industry, a long running doom clone saga, does just fine on this premise)
MSFT could have opened up idTech completely since they make 0 dollars from licensing the engine anyways.
Microsoft's game divisions make money through making games, so opening up the engine itself would've been conducive to their goals (cultivating an ecosystem of devs and even contractors familiar with the tooling).
idTech rendering is more competitive with Epic's Unreal technology than Unity and Godot.
They should simply open source it if they fire the devs. Else the engine and future support for the games built on it are essentially being tossed into the trash.
Yes. As I suggested in another thread: an open-source, modern IdTech would fill the empty quadrant in the Godot : Unity :: ____ : Unreal matrix.
A few mid-size studios pitching in to fund continued development on a Blender model could turn IdTech into a major competitor to Unreal Engine in a relatively short timeframe, ultimately costing them a lot less than licensing.
Doesn't Microsoft want fewer, bigger games locked into their Project Helix platform? Why compete with Unreal when they can sign a sweet license for the engine?
Why build an ecosystem when they are already a huge monopoly?
I think Godot/Unity: just download and play with it until you have something fun. ____/Unreal: serious library for experts. Unity/Unreal: commercial. Godot/_____: free.
It's a relic of SAT verbal analogies section which was removed in 2005. The syntax "A:B::C:D" represents the statement "A is to B as C is to D".
So on the test you'd get questions such as
python:snake :: ___ : ___
a) lua:satellite
b) swift:bird
c) java:coffee
d) pearl:gem
and you might select A because python is an interpreted scripting language and a type of snake in the same way lua is a scripting language and a type of natural satellite but you'd be wrong because the correct answer is B because the topic was actually about comparing animals.
That was an incredible example and I'm frankly more impressed each time I read it at how well constructed it is. You really capture how sensitive the analogy section is to cultural or domain knowledge, and why the College Board eliminated the question type.
Unity does not make that much money from assets. They make the majority of their revenue through licensing their engine to "whales"... the small percentage of games that make huge revenue.
They also make money through ad services... a market they seriously missed out on (look at AppLovin stock vs Unity).
Asset sales are barely a blip.
Unreal makes the vast majority of it's revenue through microtransactions on its one major whale game Fortnite
That's not how it works, first of all IdTech is not a general engine, it's only made to build specific games: fps.
Next you need to make a product out of that meaning a very large investment so that the engine is actually usable outside of ID, people that don't know what an engine is think of the rendering part but it's actually very minor compare to pipelines ect ... which we know nothing about, it might not even be good or painful to use.
Unreal is widely used because it can create any kind of game and the pipeline, tooling are good and well integrated.
A lot of unreal engine games also fork the engine. If your bar is being forked then unreal doesn’t meet the bar for a lot of people either.
3D Engines of that fidelity are rarely genre specific. Editors might be but the engines are often fairly flexible because most genres share a lot in 3D space.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadAnyone know?
Did it appear First in quake or quake III?
Checked online and indeed that’s the one! I wonder what is the biggest online community nowadays that I can play MP with.
In any case, WoW has been stagnating for quite some time even before the merger. The devs act as though everything is slow because it needs to be. Classic+ could've been much better.
I'm deeply opposed to game distribution companies (console makers) being allowed to acquire game studios.
In the same way that theaters and streaming services shouldn't be allowed to do acquisitions.
Disney owning whatever ridiculous proportion of media by buying everything serves nobody's best interest.
Was IdTech used outside of Id? Or was it just a Doom series thing as of recently?
I can't help but think the industry will be better off in a few years after this Xbox "restructure." That's a lot of knowledge and talent that's no longer stuck in 14 layers of middle management hell.
I hope the industry will be in a better place in a few years. There is this recurring theme of big companies rolling up little developers and destroying their development culture.
Why are the little devs selling to the big companies in the first place then? If you’re crushing it as an Indie studio why wouldn’t you stay that way knowing how big tech acts?
If a big company decides to make a game very similar to yours, they can make theirs win by throwing more money into marketing than you can. Do you want them to spend that marketing budget on your competition or on you?
> "I think it's perfect for us, because we can just focus on doing our inspired weird games, and not worry about how we're going to get our next deal. We aren't chasing down our next funding and thinking about how many more months of funding we have all the time."
https://gameinformer.com/2019/06/23/tim-schafer-on-microsoft...
The only people that can tell Microsoft to gargle their gonads are already rich as fuck or have a will of steel and principles uncommon with entrepreneurs.
I have near zero hope we'll see any meaningful antitrust action in the future either without a complete overhaul of the incentives in politics.
Xbox div's annual revenue is $23 billion. Its big enough to be its own company and sit upper-mid pack of the F500 on its own. It'd be the number 3 or 4th top gaming company globally, beating out Nintendo even. No reason for Microsoft to not have been broken up by now, let alone have been allowed to buy all the studios they did. Don't forget they also mislead the FTC to convince them to allow the Activision/Blizzard acquisition to go forward, and then once allowed laid off 1900 employees, mostly admin/HR & support, forcing it to integrate into Microsoft gaming and operate less independently.
Yes, but it's not the DOJ's job to tell Microsoft when they're lighting their money on fire. There's no unfair competition from this kind of thing. It wasn't any different when leather companies or old media would buy up studios and run themselves out of business.
Microsoft buying out studios could be anti-competitive, but Microsoft would have to not be Microsoft.
Firing thousands of people and closing studios reduces the overall capacity of the industry to produce diverse, competing games. Just because Microsoft is Microsoft and is incompetent doesn't mean the rest of the industry and consumers don't lose out on what those independent studios could have created on their own.
In terms of antitrust/whether the FTC should have allowed the mergers is purely predictive. Microsoft looking like idiots from it has no bearing on whether the behavior of buying them up itself is anticompetitive.
Ex: if Microsoft buys out office competitors or webmail competitors to shut them down, because those customers are going to be likely to buy more Microsoft stuff.
Buying games studios could be anticompetitive if Microsoft were going to keep them alive and make their output platform exclusive (but iirc they made a commitment not to do that). It could be anticompetitive if they were going to kill them and funnel consumers into their games with continuing development... It could also be anticompetitive if Microsoft were going to give these studios some uberengine secret access to Xbox/Windows that allowed them to make the best games that outside studios couldn't come close to...
But what's happened is Microsoft is killing the studios; all at once is a surprise, but death within like 3-7 years could be predicted. Most of those people will pop up again at other studios or start new studios. Some of them will realized gamedev sucks and do something else. This is the lifecycle of studios purchased by corporate overlords. When key people make enough from the purchase to allow significant but not complete creative freedom, they often make some really good games at their next venture. Too little freedom -> pump out sequels or gacha games; too much freedom -> interesting games that don't end up being much fun.
https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3mpy...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Doom/comments/1up5pta/95_reportedly...
And I'm not sure I share your optimism that the industry will be better. It might not be worse, because it's possible that Microsoft is just so dysfunctional that id would never be allowed to produce another good game anyway. But the people losing their jobs here might be financially better off just leaving the game industry entirely. In particular, if the engine devs were totally cut, it's not clear to me that there's room for a studio to differentiate itself with a custom engine in the modern day.
Scott Miller said it himself:
> Big day today at Id Software [...] today, Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go [...] With literally the best of the best coders in the industry.
Looking at LinkedIn, I see mostly people from tech (design tooling, game AI, QA), art (modeling, mats, UI, character), design (levels, gameplay), and production roles in DFW being cut, but haven't seen engine roles or Frankfurt-based employees.
ZeniMax's QA team was notably unionized in 2023: https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/quality-assurance-worker...
And the thing is they’re not unprofitable. Gutting their studios and technology development isn’t going to help growth, it’s going to contract the business.
We do not have a market designed to reward these things, at least not for the likes of Microsoft. For them, it's far easier to simply cut people while collecting on their previous labor. Once the product of that previous labor is no longer as valuable, it can then simply be spun off or shut down permanently.
Agreed. If you are looking at a chart of performance and it's flat or slightly increasing year over year for a few years, you're not doing great. You need to see some dips which means you tried and failed. Without those, you won't ever see the big jumps.
Their MO will always be EEE and they'll always (attempt to) abuse their monopoly power, while giving corpos and consumers just a glimmer of hope to keep them strung along...
Also any company they acquire will be gutted until it looks like the rest of the org.
The only thing that truly counts, for her.
> The glass cliff is a phenomenon described by psychologists Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam, in which women are more likely to break the "glass ceiling" (i.e. achieve leadership roles in business and government) during periods of crisis or downturn when the risk of failure is highest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
Being a woman doesn't make her not responsible despite being the ultimate decision maker in the division, nor should it shield her from criticism.
2) ...
3) profit!
Some of that is potentially 5-10 years too late, but even with the pessimism around new consoles I think Microsoft could still reset their fortunes with new console hardware and new exclusive games as the anchor.
The next Xbox shouldn't just be a box that's equivalent to a PC or a PS6, it should have something unique, the kind of uniqueness that Nintendo has delivered with every new console. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but when it works, it works.
The next Xbox should launch out of the gate with 1-2 must-have games, completely exclusive. Can't get them on PC, can't get them on PlayStation or Switch, GamePass on Xbox console only.
This is more easily justified if the Xbox hardware is truly unique. "Sorry, we can't put this experience on PC or PlayStation, because only Xbox can do XYZ"
Pretty simple, you're reading far too much into it, but thanks, it's a while since someone acknowledged my pithy status.
The fact that Microsoft has a studio making Fallout knockoffs while they own the Fallout IP is insane.
Put more effort into having pot sweeteners that get you off competing platforms and onto theirs. As it stands there’s no reason not to buy Microsoft’s games on PlayStation, PC, or Switch where Sony presumably captures 30% of the sale price.
The Xbox Ally hardware is way too late and way too niche. It should have had the operational friendliness of the Nintendo Switch, come out 5 years ago, and been first party hardware instead of a co-branded item.
There's a lot of money in gaming but the workers are treated like shit, as you pointed out.
- Someone in the early 19th century
Longshoremen literally retired early and were paid pensions out of corporate profits from container related productivity increases.
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.
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.
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.
(sure, that could be what the result of negotations is, but it doesn't have to be)
And atleast in my work, everyone is paid more than minimum.
There are enough cases of unions protecting bad actors (cops, prison guards) or lazy, tenured individuals that it's easy for a mildly privileged autodidact to decide they don't need the hurdle - or the help.
If you are in a right-to-work state and you don't join the union, then union members know you're benefiting from the union without contributing back. Historically, this leads to an uncomfortable work situation for you.
If you are not in a right-to-work state, and the collectively-bargained contract involves a union membership requirement - which is typical? - then you have to join the union if you want the job.
This is where the gatekeeping concern comes from.
> I can't see any disadvantage for the employees in joining a union.
Unions have dues, so you're giving up part of your salary for membership in the union. If the union salary is equal or less than you would be able to negotiate on your own, it's a disadvantage for you.
Traditional blue collar seniority, set wages, and hyper specific job roles simply won't work in knowledge work. So there tend to be higher severance payouts in lieu of seniority promotions, pay bands with equity review instead of pay steps, and very flexible job roles.
I think a lot of folks see unions from their youth working in construction or service work, which have a lot of corrupt "company unions" which mandate hour caps and shit benefits for part timers.
Realistically IT workers with leverage like ourselves need to think of unions as contract insurance. You already have a contract, the collective agreement can be as broad as possible to allow the flexibility to respect individual contributors, while the pooled dues are put towards eventual contract enforcement.
My first IT job gave me quite a surprise when they ripped up my contract and said "so sue us." That's the day I found out how much a labour lawyer hourly rate costs. 10 years later as a union leader I started signing the sizable cheques to our law firms, there's always a bad manager somewhere causing a lawsuit...
Not all unions are the same. There are absolutely unions that are as bad as the naysayers say, but there are also ones that you rarely hear about that just quietly chug along with decent enough relationships with employers.
That being said, the appeal to me is minimal. I like working for small to medium sized companies where I can enjoy the flexibility of what tech stacks I work on. While the idea of some sort of optional trade union that could cover me for benefits, legal fights, contract enforcement, and maybe extra job insurance is appealing, nothing like that exists where I live. I have gotten healthy severances in the past due to knowing the rights I have in my jurisdiction, but that also means having the will and ability to hire a lawyer.
I'm in my mid 40s and rode the wave of a workers market over the last 2 decades. I'm still in demand, too. It's not quite as easy as it was 5+ years ago, but AI hasn't replaced me, though I'm actually "supervising" its work from an experienced angle. From that perspective I'm just a lot more productive.
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.
Unions also many times (especially with "guild" type unions) can serve other valuable functions like guaranteeing a higher minimum quality of work (generally).
It might have to do with the unionisation, but I wouldn't be surprised that its just that Blizzard is like one of the like 4 money makers that MS still has in the gaming division and that is why they were spared.
I know it's cliche, but what are the thousands of people that work there doing all day?
So, you know, do that. <insert "c'mon, do something" meme>
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.
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.
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.
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.
This has been the objective of the tech industry for years
We've optimized our own destruction.
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.
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.
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"?
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)
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.
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.
The FSR/DLSS upscalers are typically superior to TSAA and are a reasonable replacement.
A lot of the UE tech is built around the assumption of TAA though.
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.
Fact remains though, that homogeneity and monoculture in tech is bad. Not being able to properly render all the frames of the product I paid for (without burning thousands of dollars and hundreds of watts of waste heat -- and sometimes not even then!) is worse.
I refuse to believe that upscaling is a solution to any existing problem, because I remember when we didn't have to do that. I want to render ALL the frames. Hardware is so powerful now, there should be no excuse.
The only reason I will accept upscaling is as a power-consumption strategy to be employed while on battery. For upscaling to be required for any other reason represents a failure somewhere in the game development process. I won't pay for failures, especially when it costs me yet more money in hardware to run the failure-enabling technology.
I'm not talking about playing 4k@60fps native and I'm not railing against system requirements. I get modern games require modern hardware, but the ratio of what's required to run UE titles now is skewed by an order of magnitude. Simultaneously, it feels like lowend (or even midrange) optimization has been completely forgotten.
I also think that by using something like UE or Unity, you're necessarily deprioritizing a decent chunk of the "game development" process. Instead you are first participating in cottage-industry dynamics as a business strategy, with all gamedev-related decisions relegated as subordinate to your chosen business partner(s).
Additionally - and I'm getting into conspiracy theorist territory here a little bit - I believe (to an extent) that a lot of these games are made with "cutting-edge" technologies mostly as fodder to propel the industry "forward" by whatever means necessary.
By this I mean: producing the "Next Great Photorealistic Game" (which looks/plays mostly the same as the previous year's photorealistic game but requires NVIDIA's new $2,000 graphics card to run) props up AMD and NVIDIA by requiring their latest generation of hardware. It enriches Epic Games by requiring their latest engine with new features. It encourages studio consolidation because now you need an entity like Microsoft to bankroll development if you want any hope of competing in the AAA space.
All of this works because there's a decent contingent of consumers who can be relied upon to purchase whatever comes out, no questions asked. And that's fair! If it's fun, then it's fun right?
But looking at where we're at and where we're going versus where we came from clashes with my ideology and makes it unfun to me personally.
I'm willing to believe some of this comes off as arrogant or elitist (not a gamedev, no real perspective), but these are my honest thoughts, and are how I inform the purchasing decisions I make as a consumer.
EA being bought by the Saudis and people taking a hard "moral stance" to not purchase any further EA games is another example. I've got a bridge to sell you if you think you're boycotting everything (even every video game) that's making the Saudis money. I dislike EA for other reasons and their products tend to be bland but if they make a good game I'm going to reward the developers of that game so they hopefully make further good games.
And in terms of the conspiracy theory the engine is an engine. Developers choose what to implement and can tone down all the crazy new tech as much as they want. They can also write custom stacks to do things no other Unreal Engine game would do. Unreal actually scales pretty well in that regard. Current minimum specs for Satisfactory is an i5-3570K and 1650 GTX. Recommended video card is a 2070 RTX. I have a 15 year old computer sitting in a closet that can play the game fairly well. There's so many great indie titles out there that if I only had that 15 year old computer I'd be spoiled for choice. But IMO we also need bleeding edge games to move the needle forward and keep the industry exciting. I want crazy tech in my video game that makes my jaw drop like the trailers for Witcher 4 do right now. That keeps 100s of millions of people watching things like The Video Game Awards.
In terms of homogenization I see the exact opposite happening. You probably have a slew of games to play right now that all use different engines. I myself have a backlog I don't think I can get through in my lifetime that's going to grow immensely this September. There's so many games being released and they're made in so many different ways that saying there's homogenization seems strange. Right now I'm hopping between Death Stranding 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Terratech Legion, and Resident Evil Requiem. Where is the monoculture? The idea of not giving TerraTech Legion a chance simply because the devs used unreal seems wrong.
The music sounds good? I listen to the music. The book is well written? I buy the book. The game is fun? I buy the game. You could spend your whole life nit-picking reasons why X publisher is bad, X record label is the worst (and in both cases most ARE) but in the end these companies will still make ungodly amounts of money and you're just making life less enjoyable for yourself.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "baseline", but the most recent UE5 game I've played that pretty consistently gets better than your "basic target" is The Last Caretaker (TLC). For me, it always did better than your target in the starting area, through to the point where you embark on your main quest. Prior to that, I played a whole lot of Satisfactory, which ran much, much better than TLC.
I run without AA, "upscaling", or frame hallucination. I'm using a Radeon RX 9070 on Linux, and spent most of my Satisfactory playtime with a Radeon 5700 XT.
UE5 is just an evolution of UE4 and the early adopters suffer from being early adopters. Beyond that there is a skill issue in studios shipping less than ideal performances on time constraints.
UE5 is a marvel of modern technology from all angles.
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.
Both can be true.
Just because it's becoming more common doesn't mean it's not bad.
Also there is obviously a massive gap between how games look and what the hardware is capable of. Cyberpunk runs better than total war attila on my computer as an example.
Don’t write a database, don’t write a compiler, don’t write an os, don’t write a game engine… are we all supposed to write web apps at this point?
This mindset didn’t create what we have today and won’t create what we will have tomorrow. I recommend people that like building these things to ignore this pov as much as possible
That can be true for any commodity software though. Designing something inhouse means you inherently will have engineers and experts with better low level understanding. It doesnt mean it will be better (could even be much worse) but theres a tradeoff there.
So a lot of studios think oh, the engine is already finished, we just need artists and designers to use it, all the heavy lifting has already been done. And while yes, you can make a game that way, the results will be sub optimal. But then again, free is infinitely cheaper than having an engine team maintaing your own engine or any custom elements of UE.
The build vs. buy calculus in game dev has been steadily shifting over the past 15 years, and when CD Projekt Red announced they were adopting UE5 for their next Witcher game, the writing was on the wall.
That said, Id could make a bold "commoditize your complements" move and open-source the latest, now last, IdTech. What Godot is to Unity, IdTech could be to Unreal Engine.
Looking at the start-up of Doom Dark Ages (with new expansion today), they list Havok, Oodle, Bink, and SpeedTree. Looking at Havoc's website, that already starts at 50k$ alone.
Python? => Data science. Sure, python is just importing the C tools that do the heavy lifting, but look me in the eye and tell me R, S, SAS, or SPSS won.
C? => I mean, everything? But what happened in the first 10 years? Proliferation of operating systems and linear algebra libraries?
So, generally, the grey beard talent consolidates their intellectual contributions and uplift everyone else. Is that true? -ish? Missing the mark?
Guys, I'm a knuckle-dragger, I genuinely don't know what I'm asking. What are the tech stacks that were held constant (by whatever factors) for a decade, and what came out of it?
Is this the decade where art directors takes over gaming?
Considering the bad performance of the division can probably be blamed on the art and game designers, probably not. More than likely, the gaming industry is going to atomize. Meaning many very small companies, and fewer big studios. Alienating your audience isn't exactly a career enhancing move. And that's ultimately what triggered all of this and the move towards smaller (non AAA) games.
After entering games with naive expectations of the wild west of the 90s, I would recommend other programmers not enter the AAA space, if compensation and job security are concerns. Indie game development looks like great fun, but don't expect any low-latency programming.
Kinda hard to buy an engine that is not for sale...
It's still a product-distinguishing decision you can make at the indie scale. What I mean is, you can create an engine that allows you to get the performance + aesthetic that otherwise would not be possible. i.e. Specialize in a profitable niche.
And if hardware costs keep ballooning, performance will become more important.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, no. Perhaps on the mobile slop world as vehicle to sell ads, but I wouldn’t even count those as games.
I disagree, I think there's an over-emphasis on generating high quality individual frames and a expectation of what it is you should be able to do in games.
You can have a game that is photorealistic but you turn around and have your gun barrel poke into the wall and disappear. How many games can you throw enough junk into a river and make it change course eroding a new path for itself as it goes?
Some games rely on clear specific rules of an engine for the player to know because the rules are an integral part of the game, and any inconsistency in implementation creates a feeling of being cheated. Often you can implement such things in standard engines, but you are working against them the entire way.
You could have a game where a player sees a pylon and knows that because it is made of metal you could melt one of the legs and make it fall over. but to do that the entire construction of the game rules are integrated into the world. Most games teach the player that things like pylons are static objects unless they need to be destroyed for a plot point in which case just this one is different. Perhaps the player just has to learn that pylons are one of the class of destroyable things. Making emergent properties goes engine deep.
>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.
And therein lies the problem. A game engine is game state. You can make it pretty any number of ways, The engine will still be the thing deciding what you can do, and it is the things you can do that makes it play.
Maybe if you ignore the entirety of the retro gaming scene where people are using old engines and modified old engines because they bring along a lot of the feel and expected behavior.
The average modern Unreal and Unity game feels like shit, but some dev's can pull off making new engines behave like old ones we love. It requires a lot of work. Just look at New Bloods catalog of games that pulled it off. DUSK (unity), Amid Evil (UE4), Ultrakill (Unity). Each one of those games had a lot of passion behind them driving for gameplay perfection in the style of a retro game and/or engine.
Where they actually messed up was not licensing it more aggressively to other companies like Epic has been with Unreal.
- Huge tax write-off
- Commoditizes their complement
- If it succeeds, ultimately lowers the cost of triple-A game dev
Engines has been (And is to a large extent) bad business because unless you really do something _really special_ it's way expensive for little gains (especially if you're targeting realistic games since there is so much to focus on before even considering portability).
And I say this as someone who started out working on custom engines (but am out of the business outside of hobby stuff).
I have the ability to make the engine I’m making on my own, but trying out AI for the experience. It really sucks in ways that make it good for what an engine needs. A good engine needs to plan pretty far ahead and plan well at high architecture level. AI is actually awful at that despite it being okay at making plans at implementing said plan.
Doom was absurd in the capability of squeezing terrible machines for high framerates and great visuals.
I also remember seeing a bunch of cool explanations of their rendering pipeline
I read a lot of opinions on whether it is a good idea and it all boiled down to ‘my god, no, don’t write your engine. That said, I did and I am sure glad I did invest 3 years on a framework I know like the back of my hands’ and that told me exactly what I wanted to hear.
It’s like the whole AI debacle, really. If your goal is to ship a product, go with a premade engine. If your goal is to enjoy the craft and learn how stuff works, and you got that itch to do it the difficult way, then roll your sleeves and dive in. It’s always a pleasure to play a game with a completely unique feel.
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.
So just depends on if your strategy is right.
This is 100% the push for everything to use React
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.
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.
The problem is that companies are not willing to groom new engineers to get familiar with the code.
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.
If that were the case then why do nearly all UE5 games suffer from the same engine stutter issues. And to OPs point, even if it can be optimized away, why isnt the engine in a state where the baseline performance for realtime rendering does not exhibit these stutter issues on the majority of games.
There are ways to make a player’s PC compile shaders before realtime play begins, but it takes some setup and smaller devs might not know how to do it. This is most likely the reason why stuttering happens.
On fixed hardware targets (consoles, Steam Deck) you can ship precached shaders as you know everything about the target hardware.
https://www.unrealengine.com/tech-blog/game-engines-and-shad... https://medium.com/@GroundZer0/what-unreal-doesnt-tell-you-a... https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/shader-permutations-part1...
Bundling and precompiling is not a fool-proof guarantee but it is very effective. Most often when a game has shader stutter the developers have not bundled or allowed the shaders to compile before gameplay starts (or it’s actually some other unrelated issue). The engine doesn’t do it automatically.
This is just plainly not true anymore, as far as the current gen consoles (PS5, XBox Series X) go.
I just searched for every single PS5 game built on UE5 specifically (i.e., no UE4), which wasn't super difficult, given there are 31 of them. I might be missing a few, but that sample should be representative enough.
TLDR: 28 out of 31 UE5 games on PS5 have a performance/60fps mode, making it a ~93% share.
UE-powered games collectively earn 20+ billion worldwide annually each year. Unity-powered games also earn 20+ billion annually. This means that each year these "bad" game engines power more revenue than every YCombinator company combined.
Meanwhile, idTech, however technically amazing it may be, is so complicated to develop for that even id Software doesn't use it for every game.
I think this is a bit of a myth. Unreal gets this criticism a lot, but it's usually because many studios choose to stick close to the rendering defaults, which does lead to a certain look.
To that point, it's probably a lot cheaper to configure Unreal or Unity into a unique "grain" than it is to develop your own engine. It's also possible to use custom physics instead of those built into the engine.
So your choices are to tweak the defaults (which are not bad, but generic and the same as everybody else's), or rebuild the whole renderer (like ARC raiders did for example)
There’s the whole forward renderer path you can use instead, which works well on lighter hardware. Or you can use baked lighting instead of Lumen, and some people have created other realtime GI systems as plugins.
You can’t really change the material-shader pipeline though without overhauling the entire engine.
There are also a ton of parameters and configuration options you can change. These can be quite obscure and this is where small studios struggle.
Someone certainly could painstakingly replicate each badness of Unreal in Unity (and vice-versa), but until then, UE and Unity games often do feel like UE and Unity games. It's also rare to play a UE game that feels good and polished.
I wanted to make a little editor utility (the UE editor is built in UE) that changed the way viewport selection was handled. I think I got to 5 layers of abstraction before I gave up. 5 layers, for a left-click object select.
People like to complain about the time it takes to ship AAA games and how huge the budgets have gotten... and then complain that the UE5 games all look the same. You either use some amount of systems 'out of the box' or customize/rewrite everything and burn $$$.
I open Microsoft Office on the web and the page reloads three times before showing me a list of files, then I open a document and it loads for 5 or 10 seconds, constantly reflowing, before eventually the entire page reloads again and eventually stabilizes, finally allowing me to browse and edit. After all of this, everything besides collaboration manages to function worse than what we had in Office 2003 two decades ago. This happened to all of software, not just Office. It happened to games, too. Delayed, over budget, underdelivered. No thanks.
You ask fair questions, but there clearly loaded. Games are like any other project, and the desired scope for games has gotten enormous. If you don’t like those games there’s more indie and AA titles being released these days than there were AAA titles 25 years ago. An awful lot of that is down to Unity and Unreal.
> does it feel good to walk around in?
This isn’t a priority for every game. A bunch of the most beloved games have absolutely awful movement mechanics. It’s very often a deliberate choice to _not_ make player movement feel like either Titanfall or TLOU (partially because it’s an incredible amount of work to do that). Some really good examples are Witcher 3, RDR2, shadow of the colossus, the entire fromsoft collection. (And notice none of those are Unreal!)
> does it default to having a nauseating motion blur filter
Motion blur is super divisive. Anecdotally what I’ve seen is that most people just don’t care and there’s a very vocal minority who disable it. We had telemetry on a previous game and the number of people who opted out was minuscule. We gave an option for on/off on first launch of the game. It helps when frame rates are teetering on the edge of our budget which is often why we enable it.
> does it run at 40 FPS with minimum graphical settings on a $2000
What games do you have in mind there?
> even just "is this fun? challenging? interesting in any other way?"
This isn’t fair. Any game I’ve worked on has had the majority of the team playing every week, and the gameplay and design teams playing more often than that. You may not like the game, and that’s fine, and some games might be more vanilla than your liking, but those games are wildly popular. Personally - I think the praise Nintendo get for a simple platformer (which has excellent controls, admittedly) is way overblown, and peoplr are willing to overlook that they’ve been shipping the same game for 20 years and charging more than most AAA games during that time frame. I also think BOTW and TOTK are wildly overrated - they’re padded out, clunky, with some of the worst mechanics in games (weapon stamina) on undercooked hardware.
But that doesn’t mean that other people can’t enjoy them.
I think working around shader compiles is really tough in Unreal and you’ll struggle to get rid of the stutters even if you do everything you can there. But two games using chaos, UMG, niagara, GAS, and Mover can look and feel night and day different as long as that effort is put in. But it’s easy to not put that in.
> I’ve noticed AAA studios do less custom c++
Yeah - and I do think this is sad. You can take your custom C++ libraries and bolt them onto unreal quite easily, and it’s not an awful amount of work to expose an Unreal friendly API to it. 13 years ago I was tasked with replacing physx in Unreal, I can’t see (m)any studios wanting to spend 6 months on that endeavour these days.
that's exactly the argument?
you can do anything if you put enough effort in - but effort is finite, so in aggregate the distribution will cluster around the defaults
It may have been great, and lapped the entire industry, but it wasn't getting used very much, even internally at Microsoft. So how much value was really bringing?
Compared to other engines, making a new material asset is easy for someone less technical to do willy-nilly.
The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials.
...which is a good thing tbh. No game needs hundreds or thousands of custom materials.
Unreal Engine managed to evolve and expand the engine to the point where it is somewhat game agnostic, crytech became lumberyard under Amazon and died, idTech became the engine solely for iD games (ie the same business model as every other game or publisher custom engine).
iD tech's rendering pipeline is focussed on the one AA game iD are publishing that year and making that one game run efficiently and beautifully on mid-high end PC and current consoles. UE5 is focussed on providing tools for anyone to (relatively) easily make good looking games and applications that can be published to a wide range of devices.
Unless you shoot Fuji (where their absolutely incredible film emulation engine is one of the big differentiators), most serious-ish photographers shoot raw rather than jpeg, and do their own processing after, so the sooc jpeg look is largely irrelevant.
Ridiculous and provably false.
It's like saying "every novel written with a typewriter tends to produce stories with a certain theme and dialog"
Even the character actor can sometimes feel similar. Visuals are by far the most indicative thing of an engine. Don’t forget about unreal’s awful shader stutters.
calling that ridiculous is extremely strange. Feel free to prove it false I guess?
I certainly think there is was inflection point for Unreal’s inherent complexity moving to 5 that made it exponentially more difficult to customize when compared to 4 as far as implementing highly customized renderers (in particular) and overall customization in general.
Rather, it's like saying that every academic paper typeset in Latex using the stock Computer Modern font face gives off the same sort of vibe. That doesn't mean that every paper typeset in Latex has identical value, but academic papers aren't trying to sell themselves based on first impressions, whereas games are.
>Ridiculous and provably false.
If you prefer a counterexample, a couple of years ago I noticed that Apex Legends was a Source engine game without external info, and that Source version is heavily modified. Of course one can modify the provided defaults to a point that even the most no-life individual couldn't guess the engine.
I watched a cool video about the whole "engine grain" thing recently with more examples. https://youtu.be/SOwYqwsEdXc
There's a degree of toupee fallacy to this. It's hard to tell what engine something is on just from gameplay if the team invested in custom rendering and gamefeel.
I used to be able to pick graphics/physics engine by feel alone. PhysX and Havok used to feel very different. Quake 3/Half Life/Unreal used to feel very different. But that's all largely been paved over.
Actually I think I can still spot Crytek tbh.
Fair on the Unreal Engine part, but Quake 3 and Half-Life are basically built on sibling engines that share one direct common ancestor (though I fully agree with you that they felt different).
Quake/Quake 2 used idTech2. idTech3 for Quake 3 was built on top of idTech2, and GoldSrc for Half-Life was built on top of idTech2 as well (it was a heavily customized and modified version of it).
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.
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.
Asking for a raise is a bad thing? Lol your average Silicon Valley sociopath
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.
1: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/bethesda-parent...
2: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/09/21/welcoming-bethesda-to...
3: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/zenimax-board-of-directors...
"I made a good game in 2016. I was paid for that, it was literally my job. 10 years later they let me go." Oh no, boo hoo.
Disgusting.
Resetting Xbox
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804993
If you farm out art, you end up with a confused set of props / designs. If you farm out code, you end up with a mess of different assumptions and patterns.
If you’re designing and considering everything, then you’re essentially running a studio but now remotely from another country.
A lead studio with a small headcount can outsource work internationally for often much cheaper than the same job done locally, but also not have to pay those workers in stages of development where there’s not enough work for them.
For businesses the labour entry point is crowded, wages therefore are low. We find it more common to hire students and pay minimally, use exposure as the negotiating tool.
I know multiple publishers who advocate for that model; outsourcing, not so much. Unless they have a trusted partner, but at that point, they're essentially acting as an arm of the publisher.
I feel that this is an incredibly unfair and demeaning take both towards Microsoft and towards the people being fired. As I see it, getting fired is just like being dumped by a romantic partner. It typically says very little about your value as an individual, and almost everything about their current situation and how the relationship with you fits into their future plans and the other opportunities available to them.
Microsoft needs to be split, it should been split years ago, but now more than ever.
"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" isn't applicable at all in this context though?
Who woulda thunk they were full of crap...? (besides everyone who didn't have a financial stake in the deal)
If they were smarter about this, they would commoditize their compliment and open source the Doom The Dark Ages engine just like John Carmack did with the Quake 3 engine.
The last non-Id release on IdTech was Brink in 2011.
Microsoft's game divisions make money through making games, so opening up the engine itself would've been conducive to their goals (cultivating an ecosystem of devs and even contractors familiar with the tooling).
idTech rendering is more competitive with Epic's Unreal technology than Unity and Godot.
They should simply open source it if they fire the devs. Else the engine and future support for the games built on it are essentially being tossed into the trash.
A few mid-size studios pitching in to fund continued development on a Blender model could turn IdTech into a major competitor to Unreal Engine in a relatively short timeframe, ultimately costing them a lot less than licensing.
Doesn't Microsoft want fewer, bigger games locked into their Project Helix platform? Why compete with Unreal when they can sign a sweet license for the engine?
Why build an ecosystem when they are already a huge monopoly?
Godot and Unity can be dealt with by a small studio (or even 1 person), Godot and Id get much better performance than Unity and Unreal
So on the test you'd get questions such as
and you might select A because python is an interpreted scripting language and a type of snake in the same way lua is a scripting language and a type of natural satellite but you'd be wrong because the correct answer is B because the topic was actually about comparing animals.A swift is a type of bird, so that would follow the same logic as the example;
ProgrammingLang:Animal
They also make money through ad services... a market they seriously missed out on (look at AppLovin stock vs Unity).
Asset sales are barely a blip.
Unreal makes the vast majority of it's revenue through microtransactions on its one major whale game Fortnite
Next you need to make a product out of that meaning a very large investment so that the engine is actually usable outside of ID, people that don't know what an engine is think of the rendering part but it's actually very minor compare to pipelines ect ... which we know nothing about, it might not even be good or painful to use.
Unreal is widely used because it can create any kind of game and the pipeline, tooling are good and well integrated.
3D Engines of that fidelity are rarely genre specific. Editors might be but the engines are often fairly flexible because most genres share a lot in 3D space.
I hear a lot of good things about modern idTech. Pervasive multithreading is one, and it's not particular to the FPS genre.