IDDQD to you all
Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
441–450 of 628 posts
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why not? If you input $1000 into process A which returns $20, and inputing $1000 into process B returns $30, you'd be insane to invest in process A and not process B, right?
the bond example is a return on your money, the profit margin example is a return on other people's money.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. I don't really understand making hard and fast rules like this. Clair Obscur is one of the best and most beautiful games I've ever played. The Witcher 4 has the best graphics I've seen come from a video game. Satisfactory is nuts to look at when you see an eloquent end game build. I also don't understand why people knee-jerk hate upscaling/fake frames so much. I can understa…
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. The inability to properly render all the frames of the product I paid for, without burning thousands of dollars on hardware and emitting hundreds of watts of waste heat (and sometimes not even then!) is worse.
I refuse to believe that upscaling/framegen 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 at actual resolution. Hardware is so powerful now, there should be no excuse.
The only reason I will accept upscaling is as a power-management 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 software like UE or Unity, you're necessarily deprioritizing a decent chunk of the "game development" process. Instead you are choosing first & foremost to participate 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.
Despite how bloated and ridiculous this has become, the industry continues to grind forward as these companies perpetuate and profit from the model, 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 that consumer is ever-more taxed by the state of AAA gaming. And it only gets grimmer every year (as evidenced by TFA and recent happenings at Xbox).
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. 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.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a source for this ?
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.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you pick it out of films and TV shows? (Not being snarky - legit question)
Sometimes yes absolutely. Netflix shows often have a "house look" to them, because they enforce specific camera requirements and have a standardized / commonly-reused lighting setup - https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360... https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a61878509/netflix-s... --- Marvel movies often reuse a particular pattern of color grading, that can give them a sort of 'similar g…
I think they mean the use of UE5 in movies.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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 repli…
AAA dev here - movemen, physics UI frameworks are infinitely customisable in Unreal. It’s all about how much time you spend on them.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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…
> usually because many studios choose to stick close to the rendering defaults, which does lead to a certain look
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
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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)
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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"
When you buy a book, it doesn't include the typewriter it was written with.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Craft > sales. Great craftsmanship always sells, That is exactly how I perceived the game industry to be before I worked in it. Now I know that there are many objectively excellent or even innovative or influential games that do not sell, or also do not sell well enough to support their development costs.
Could you give an example of something excellent and either innovative or influential that did not sell well? It’s a question I have sought to answer myself. Especially if you can find one that doesn’t take development costs into account. So I’m looking for an “objectively” (figuratively) excellent game, that has not sold many copies at all. A game on steam that should be popular but isn’t. Do you have any examples?
I’ve worked on a bunch of games that have been canned despite being crafted with love and innovative in their own ways. It’s not enough to just be well crafted, especially if you need to pay the salaries of 10 people for 1-2 years to make the game.