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Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

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Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#531

Post by [deleted] »

mortenjorck wrote: post #209
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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#532

Post by newtonianrules »

thewebguyd wrote: post #112
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.

Its already started, within Blizzard. Communications Workers of America Union across the WoW and Overwatch teams. 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.

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?

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#533

Post by zetanor »

midnightclubbed wrote: post #517
maccard wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AAA dev here - movemen, physics UI frameworks are infinitely customisable in Unreal. It’s all about how much time you spend on them.

This 100x. 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.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#534

Post by Grombobulous »

satvikpendem wrote: post #125
Grombobulous wrote: post #16

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.

What is the recipe?

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.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#535

Post by invalidOrTaken »

tranceylc wrote: post #373
georgeecollins wrote: post #340

Earlier 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?

Wildgate

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#536

Post by ahartmetz »

willis936 wrote: post #480
Cpoll wrote: post #283

Earlier 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…

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.

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.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#537

Post by Klaster_1 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #256
epolanski wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

id tech has stellar performance compared to a very general purpose engine like UE. Doom was absurd in the capability of squeezing terrible machines for high framerates and great visuals.

Did they do any talks about optimization?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTrdeqMMMK0

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#538

Post by LarsDu88 »

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.

To be fair Unreal has rock solid netcode and Doom The Dark Ages has non-existant netcode.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#539

Post by pjmlp »

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.

It is already a thing in many countries that aren't anti-unions like in US.

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.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#540

Post by zkmon »

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 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.
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