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Next: Blizzard
A big chunks of Blizzard has already pre-emptively unionized for this exact reason.
It's sad to watch corporate leadership try to fix problems with tactics that will only make them worse. MS bought successful studios who were successful precisely because their of unique technical and design culture. Now they plan to homogenise them into a content-creation blob that will churn out entries for existing franchises, using the same tools and approaches as the rest of the industry. Anything that was speci…
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Considering how bad Blizzard has gotten the last 10 or so years, I would expect a bloodbath there. I don't know how they avoid it.
Why? What unsuccessful game does Blizzard have?
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…
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.
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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…
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 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 looks exactly like what Microsoft already did to its browser engine Trident, which was replaced by Google’s Blink on Edge.
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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…
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) b…
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I actually think this is the wrong diagnosis of this situation. The studios in Microsoft gaming appear to have been given a lot of room to take risks under previous leadership, build passion projects, etc. while letting big franchises sit on the side. Those things ended up being anywhere from abject failures to small successes - where some players and critics loved them - but most don't seem to be commercial successe…
I'm confused, do people want endless sequels or not?
Disney + Marvel offers a roadmap for extending existing IP. (Keep in mind that the Marvel acquisition was in 2009.)
They are moving most of their development to India, where it's pretty easy to find bottom-dollar UE5 dev shops.