Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

gamefromscratch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 628 posts

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#481

Post by GloriousKoji »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #440
mortenjorck wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does this matrix mean?

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.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#482

Post by panza »

datakan wrote: post #213
kcb wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What unsuccessful game does Blizzard have?

All of them. Diablo is dead. They can't capitalize on StarCraft. All they have left with WoW is micro transactions for old users. Overwatch has been a disaster for years. Blizzard hasn't had a win in a very long time.

Diablo IV is not dead: https://mmo-population.com/today

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#483

Post by danparsonson »

inigyou wrote: post #472
sailorganymede wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the thing that annoys me. They have the Fallout series hostage and moves like this sadden me because I can't expect the next game to particularly great when stuff like this happens.

You can make a fallout game yourself if you don't call it fallout.

"Radioactive Dust 5" doesn't have quite the same ring to it though

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#484

Post by willis936 »

eightysixfour wrote: post #232
LarsDu88 wrote: post #63

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.

I think they should have moved Halo onto it instead of Unreal.

This would have gone so hard. A return to the arena shooter roots would have been the shot in the ass the series needed.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#485

Post by inigyou »

danparsonson wrote: post #483
inigyou wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make a fallout game yourself if you don't call it fallout.

"Radioactive Dust 5" doesn't have quite the same ring to it though

Alternative trademarks never do. Every company gets started anyway. I'm sure International Business Machines felt they sounded like a low budget knock-off of National Cash Register.

Radioactive Dust is quite uninspired though, how about Super Nuclear Apocalypse Bros DX

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#486

Post by teamonkey »

ntSean wrote: post #444
teamonkey wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#487

Post by willis936 »

ironman1478 wrote: post #384
stego-tech wrote: post #221

This hurts , in a very specific way. Those coders are legendary wizards of the craft, understanding engine design and systems architecture in a way nobody else in the industry does. This is a team that could get 200fps+ in their games with RT on and no dynamic reconstruction or upscaling to be had, at a time when everyone else mandated such shortcuts to have even 30-45fps at a similar resolution. They did all this wh…

Just to play devils advocate, was all of that worth it? There are equally fun or more fun indie games that don't have great graphics, but the gameplay is astounding. DUSK is an example of this. I love that these teams are pushing boundaries of technology, but it also points to an issue with modern game AAA development. It's expensive to make these beautiful games and it's not like they are more enjoyable than games m…

Why compare to indie games? MS family game studios aren't making indie games, they're churning out faceless UE malaise. You should be comparing id tech games to UE games.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#488

Post by dghlsakjg »

inigyou wrote: post #466
khurs wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 inc…

Isn't that the company that was found to be doing illegal market manipulation in India? I don't know if their profits are related to their devs.

That's also where SBF mentored Caroline Ellison!

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#489

Post by SepiaSapient »

socalgal2 wrote: post #347
munificent wrote: post #224

Earlier 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"

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

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#490

Post by shaewest »

ahmadyan wrote: post #371
Toluhis wrote: post #286

Of all the firing decisions at Xbox this is the most shortsighted. Do you think or how has competing with the world on another UE work for you? games would run worse , feel worse. You should be encouraging more people to use Idtech.

Also Unreal Engine is not free, it cost 5% of revenue, or $3 per game sold (assume $59.99 msrp). for small studio, ok, but for Microsoft's Scale? i don't know. IIRC Doom Dark Age sold 3m? copies, so it would cost $10m in Unreal Engine fees. Doom Engine team likely cost more. Microsoft problem is it is giving away games for free on gamepass, so it sees its engineers as cost center.

The likelihood that MSFT wouldn't have a specific deal for UE is super low. But even in that case, I would imagine that costs for hiring a team to maintain an engine for the minimal games using IDTech's engine (Wolfenstein & Doom), in which they probably plan to reduce development of those games with recent news, makes this a 'not unreasonable' decision.
Post reply on HN