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Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

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Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#181

Post by shagie »

sleepybrett wrote: post #134
mjr00 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (Tournam…

Man I miss tribes and tribes 2. Sadly the revival was garbage.

A nostalgia point for Tribes...

There was a lan gaming place back when people had dial up... and that place had a T1 to the store that had double low double digit ping times when triple digit was common.

Tribes was one of the games installed and this also had the advantage that when a few people in the store were playing it they could coordinate playing a tank much better than other players on the server.

MissionForce: CyberStorm is over on GOG for another game from that publisher from that timeframe.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#182

Post by khurs »

ndiddy wrote: post #19

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 yo…

>It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans.

Jane Street hires devs at high salaries and makes them use OCaml rather than a more mainstream language. The company makes more money trading than traditional giants like JP Morgan do.

So just depends on if your strategy is right. I blame Microsoft incompetence.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#183

Post by Melatonic »

Lerc wrote: post #117
ndiddy wrote: post #19

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 yo…

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…

Except that Idtech practically invented the modern 3D engine and is constantly pushing the envelope

Where they actually messed up was not licensing it more aggressively to other companies like Epic has been with Unreal.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#184

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

ndiddy wrote: post #19

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 yo…

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.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#185

Post by mortenjorck »

mjr00 wrote: post #104
ndiddy wrote: post #19

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 yo…

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 (Tournam…

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.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#186

Post by ryandvm »

londons_explore wrote: post #87
SteveNuts wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With the current trajectory of AI, I see unionisation efforts dead in the water.

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.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#187

Post by bathtub365 »

tibbydudeza wrote: post #149

Unreal Engine has become a commodity, and it is easier to recruit people with experience - even CD Projekt Red gave up. The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda. I would not include Cloud Imperium here because they are forever in a beta state with no clear ship date in the future for their two games.

Also IO Interactive, Guerrilla Games, Santa Monica Studio

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#189

Post by whizzter »

Lerc wrote: post #117
ndiddy wrote: post #19

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 yo…

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…

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).

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#190

Post by mortoc »

SteveNuts wrote: post #48
ndiddy wrote: post #19

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 yo…

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

There's a good chance that Blizzard was spared a lot of this round of layoffs because they're in labor contract negotiations right now.
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