Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
That example only says 3% margin is better than 2% margin, not whether the hypothetical process yields better results than a bond paying 4% (or whatever). If the said process takes exactly 1 year to complete, and requires all the inputs to be provided upfront, then its margins can be directly compared to bond yields, but businesses are rarely that simple.
Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
251–260 of 628 posts
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#252[flagged]
Secondly, The "go woke or broke" thing has been a Schrodinger's mantra used by grifters to sell outrage. Everything is woke until it succeeds, and then suddenly it was always predetermined to succeed. The market, on the whole, doesn't seem to care about or pay attention to these things as much as you imply. The worst examples, like Concord, are games that are shit across the board and compete in really crowded markets. The "Sweet baby" watch group on steam flagged Elden Ring, for christsake. If anything, the indie games are even more woke.
But there is certainly a loud minority that will insist this is a massive threat to the industry. I for one cannot wait until people learn how to criticize games again. It's unfortunate good game criticism is being overtaken by to a crowd of tourists that flatten game quality to a checklist of anti woke signifiers. It sucks. But it mostly affects internet comments.
I think the fact that you are not a gamer but the first thing you think of when you imagine what gamers care about is Sweet Baby Inc says more about the content you consume.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#253So the question is, what's left? Because there's no gameplay leadership either, and that's the whole fucking point.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#254I 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…
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…
The problem is that companies are not willing to groom new engineers to get familiar with the code.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is, every time you take a swing on one of those big IPs, you take a risk. Sure, you can do well: Skyrim was a big step up from Oblivion, for example. But you can also screw things up (see: Halo), or fall into the trap that Valve has fallen into with Half-Life 3 where the expectations of the public can never be truly met. I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people i…
> The thing is, every time you take a swing on one of those big IPs, you take a risk. I think the entire content production industry, no matter the medium, is aware of the risk/reward of rerunning existing IP vs creating new IP. There's a reason we get retreads of retreads elsewhere, existing IP is lower risk, higher reward, pretty much always. Halo is a good example - they fumbled with Infinite. It just wasn't very…
The fanbase already has the Master Chief Collection. The remake seems doomed to fumble worse than MCC's notorious launch issues and it should be obvious to anyone looking at the project on paper. MCC was a team with ownership trying to learn the ins and outs of decades of work on the Slipspace engine to recreate each step of the Halo journey in an upgraded/consolidated form of its own engine. The new remake is a mostly outsourced team that basically owns nothing trying to recreate Halo mechanics in UE5 with the help of LLMs and other AI upscalers. That's nothing like what the real fans should want for the franchise. It reeks of corporate mismanagement misunderstanding what IP is for. It also reeks as a slap in the face for the hard work on the MCC (and yeah 5 and Infinite, fumbles and all).
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
- Huge tax write-off
- Commoditizes their complement
- If it succeeds, ultimately lowers the cost of triple-A game dev
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#258Wow, that tweet claiming the Doom series is the best first person action game in the entire industry is crazy. That dev has to be completely disconnected from the rest of the game industry or delusional. No stats support that claim at all. Not player count, not sales, not reviews, nothing. The first Doom was certainly industry defining, but it and its sequels have never been considered the best by anyone except appar…
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#259Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#260I 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…
I read a lot of opinions on whether it is a good idea and it all boiled down to ‘my god, no, don’t write your engine. That said, I did and I am sure glad I did invest 3 years on a framework I know like the back of my hands’ and that told me exactly what I wanted to hear.
It’s like the whole AI debacle, really. If your goal is to ship a product, go with a premade engine. If your goal is to enjoy the craft and learn how stuff works, and you got that itch to do it the difficult way, then roll your sleeves and dive in. It’s always a pleasure to play a game with a completely unique feel.