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 you can get access to tons of low-wage contractors who know UE5. You can hire a bunch of them when you start a game project and then lay them all off when it's finished, and rinse and repeat as necessary. 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.
100% disagree. If the software engineers strike, who’s going to be left to wrangle the AI? I would love to see what a game developer - nevermind released - that way would look like.
> If the software engineers strike, who’s going to be left to wrangle the AI?
The scabs who don't strike?
I'm pro-union and unlike the person you are responding to I'm not sure things are "dead in the water", but I do think software developers had a much better leg to stand on to push for unionization a few years ago than they have now (and, probably, going forward).
Replacing line engineers and operators is very difficult.
Volkswagen is firing 100k employees in Germany none the less.
The idea that you can successfully unionize in software..in US..Where you could simply retain a small number of staff key members pay them very well and put them on a mission of outsourcing and milking the IPs..I don't see it.
It's almost as if... laborers in every field (the proletariat) have to unionize as a class against the ownership class (the bourgeoisie), seize the means of production, and reorganize society to their own benefit because the bourgeoisie surely will not!
I don't think "the means of production" hits the mark. Most of us programmers have the means of production: a 20-year-old laptop with a new battery is sufficient for most serious webdev and appdev work. What we lack is permission to labour. If I do what I think needs to be done, instead of what my employer tells me to do, then I don't get paid by my now-former employer (which is fair), and then I don't eat (less fair) or keep my house (truly baffling). This despite the fact that the work I would choose to do is much more valuable to society at large than most of the work I can get paid for.
I've seen this idea discussed by others, but I don't know any pithy slogans for it. (Unfortunately, it's the ideologies with the catchiest sound-bites which tend to dominate in the "marketplace of ideas".)
Gamedev is different, since even games from 20 years ago (e.g. Half-Life 2) require a higher-spec computer to develop than to target. The games you can make on a 20-year-old potato are limited: for those, I can see how the "means of production" idea might be more applicable.
Hey, I don't want to rule all of society! I'd just like to be able to contribute to it meaningfully. Rewriting some corporate app from React to Flutter, replacing one set of bugs with another, is not a good use of resources. I can do so much more! … but the people most in need of my skills do not have the money to pay for my food, housing and electricity, even if I were to forego all other luxuries.
I don't think myself wise enough to know how to fix this, and given that fact I certainly don't want to rule; but I can at least point out the problem.
Rule's maybe too strong a word, but knowing that you have all the good ideas and wanting to structure everything to support those good ideas... it's not a bad word for it.
Like, it's certainly easy to point out that there are things that aren't being done efficiently, but finding the balance on how to prioritize the right efficiencies is the why society exists.
I don't have all the good ideas. I have probably three good ideas, and I'm not sure which those are. Working on my own good ideas is for my personal time. For my actual job, I am perfectly content with working on other people's good ideas, of which there are too many to count – but I can't do that, because the people who'd most be helped by me working on other people's good ideas do not control the flow of money, and cannot redirect any money to me in exchange for my labour.
I don't want to structure everything to support my good ideas: I want to structure everything to support everybody else's good ideas. We can surely do better than the status quo, which is to structure everything to support a few billionaires' bad ideas. (Why are the only business models for the web "gatekeep" and "surveillance advertising"? Why are we burning valuable hydrocarbons when we orbit a star? Why is the pornography industry so abusive? Why are our social lives mediated by the anorexia rectangle – what happened to local third spaces? Why do we even have the anorexia rectangle – what happened to personal computing? When everyone knows what's wrong with the municipal plumbing, including the people whose job it is to work on it, why is nobody permitted to fix it? Why are so many resources being poured into generative AI to solve problems that we already have cheaper solutions to, if only they were permitted to be be implemented? Why war?)
I do not labour under the delusion that I can fix any of these issues, or would be able to fix them if I were "in charge" (whatever that means). But I know that these problems are not intrinsic features of the universe: they can be fixed in principle.
Volkswagen Group (and in general German manufacturing) profits slumped by ~50% because of banning Russian gas and stringent U.S. import tariffs. The increase in gas costs made German manufacturing uncompetitive compared to China.
One main reason is they are not selling as much in China.
> Over the past few years foreign carmakers in China have been flattened by local rivals such as BYD that have fast become world leaders in electric vehicles. As the Chinese market has gone electric, foreign carmakers’ share of it plummeted from 62% in 2020 to 35% last year. VW has lost its position as the top carmaker in the country. Last year it sold 2.9m cars in China, down from 3.9m in 2020. Only around 200,000 were EVs.
Not quite true, the CEO has to go and convince the owners this makes sense, the owners include various labour representatives who can veto it forcing VW to slowly die.
Unions work when there is a shortage in skilled potential employees and a long learning ramp-up period. Unions work not very well when there is a glut of skilled people, or there are enough people with lower skills willing to take a lower pay rate (or where that lower pay rate is considered well-paid). There is no shortage of people who want to work in the game industry. There is a sorta shortage in people who know game engines in and out, and people who don't need to refer constantly to API references... people who put in 35-40 hour work weeks competing with people willing to put in 45 hour work weeks are generally at a disadvantage.
Yeah I think the 19th century was a little bit different than today. Unions only work as far as you, the worker, are irreplaceable. Plumbers, electricians, etc. -- all that work has to be done "here and now." You can't just instantly teleport a bunch of Indian plumbers to fix a broken water main in downtown New York. Those tradeworkers have actual leverage. And, to your example, what is feasible to outsource (either to other countries or technology) shifts over time.
You _can_ do computer-based work anywhere, anytime. People working in software have no leverage at all, between India and AI. Software unions will kick the race to the bottom into overdrive.
Companies thought plumbers, electricians, etc were fungible. They didn't care which one they hired, they just needed one. There were always more in town or the next town over.
Software work appearing to be extremely fungible with offshoring and AI is all the more reason to unionize. It doesn't matter to the employer who is doing the work, so the union is the only leverage to truly saying, "hey as the person actually doing the work, I would like to be treated better, and you can't just ignore me, fire me, and replace me".
The race to the bottom already started as soon as companies saw more fungibility where there was less before. Software unions won't kick that into overdrive, they'll slow it down.
"The International Workingmen's Association (IWA), commonly known as the First International [...] was founded in 1864 [...] The preparatory Address of English to French Workmen, drafted by trade union leader George Odger, articulated the need for international cooperation to prevent the importation of foreign workers to break strikes:
A fraternity of peoples is highly necessary for the cause of labour, for we find that whenever we attempt to better our social condition by reducing the hours of toil, or by raising the price of labour, our employers threaten us with bringing over Frenchmen, Germans, Belgians and others to do our work at a reduced rate of wages [...]"
I could see this being the flawed perspective of management, and that it could genuinely make union negotiations more difficult as a result. But it's short and narrow-sighted.
I read the book and that's not the first thing that comes to mind.
What comes to mind is whole towns made of dockworkers which disappeared, and some places like Manchester lost their port and their industry died too, and it took them decades to recover.
Of course, some other like Rotterdam flourished.
I do recommend the book, but I think it shows many sides of what happens when a large change happens.
Yup. I was one of the self-taught software "engineers" from the 90s. I enjoyed making more money than I deserved for my special interest and for the duration of my career I was very much against software engineering unionization as it seemed to mostly be gatekeeping for a lucrative and enjoyable line of work.
Now I'm 40+ years old and my job has morphed from designing systems and writing code to sweet-talking LLMs into staying within my guardrails, or something. Whatever it is, it is very much *not programming*.
Obviously unions would be in a position to limit the software engineering wrecking ball that is AI, but I pushed against that and now I have to sleep in the bed I made.
If its any consolation, its the bed we made collectively. It was easy to push back against unionization early on, we were likely better off individually. I too am self taught, although I went the ops route, and enjoyed making more money than I thought I deserved from basically a hobby, and a skill so in demand that I could effectively just go to any company I wanted at any time.
I'm also turning 40 this year, and can look back and wish we all did things differently but the wild west nature of early tech that allowed a self taught college dropout to build a successful career was too good, beneficial. It was one of the rare times that true upward class mobility was possible for anyone with a little bit of tech aptitude, so I think it can be forgiven that we didn't unionize or push for it back then.
I do feel bad for anyone graduating right now or just trying to enter the field though. The ladder has been pulled up.
I don't know how things work in your country, but here in europe union sets minimum wage for a position/skill level.
If you work more, you get paid more in overtime pay, if you are more skilled, usually you have higher wage.
And atleast in my work, everyone is paid more than minimum.
To be fair, at this point in my life I think unions are a net positive and probably the most effective protection workers have from predatory management, but the 25 year old libertarian take on this is issue is based on things like unions lobbying states to require licensure. Restricting entry obviously benefits incumbents, which is the very definition of gatekeeping, and it would have specifically hampered a self-taught engineer like myself.
There are enough cases of unions protecting bad actors (cops, prison guards) or lazy, tenured individuals that it's easy for a mildly privileged autodidact to decide they don't need the hurdle - or the help.
If you are in a right-to-work state and you don't join the union, then union members know you're benefiting from the union without contributing back. Historically, this leads to an uncomfortable work situation for you.
If you are not in a right-to-work state, and the collectively-bargained contract involves a union membership requirement - which is typical? - then you have to join the union if you want the job.
This is where the gatekeeping concern comes from.
> I can't see any disadvantage for the employees in joining a union.
Unions have dues, so you're giving up part of your salary for membership in the union. If the union salary is equal or less than you would be able to negotiate on your own, it's a disadvantage for you.
In the devils advocate position. The union is a club you join with dues paid every month, in the sort of vague hope this will get you greater bargaining power with the employer. And it mostly works but there are downsides. If there is any meritocracy left in the corporation it is sucked out, replaced by seniority, that is, the only people that get ahead are those too stupid to leave. You have to maintain a bunch of useless leeches in the union administration. and when the company does poorly it tends to implode violently under the labor burden rather than be able to scale down. (everybody loses their job rather than just a few)
Former IT union leader. It really depends on the union because every contract is unique to the bargaining group and employer.
Traditional blue collar seniority, set wages, and hyper specific job roles simply won't work in knowledge work. So there tend to be higher severance payouts in lieu of seniority promotions, pay bands with equity review instead of pay steps, and very flexible job roles.
I think a lot of folks see unions from their youth working in construction or service work, which have a lot of corrupt "company unions" which mandate hour caps and shit benefits for part timers.
Realistically IT workers with leverage like ourselves need to think of unions as contract insurance. You already have a contract, the collective agreement can be as broad as possible to allow the flexibility to respect individual contributors, while the pooled dues are put towards eventual contract enforcement.
My first IT job gave me quite a surprise when they ripped up my contract and said "so sue us." That's the day I found out how much a labour lawyer hourly rate costs. 10 years later as a union leader I started signing the sizable cheques to our law firms, there's always a bad manager somewhere causing a lawsuit...
One way unions negotiate higher pay is to make sure the pool of qualified workers is restricted. Ie. Lobby for laws that a specific qualification is required, and then set caps on the number of places to earn that qualification.
Industries with high levels of unionization tend to have lower turnover, which can be good for employees already inside, but can make it harder for new employees to join. They also can have various rules, like seniority, that take precedence over other forms of promotions (whether meritocratic or not). Unions are also inherently political where membership voting, with all the internal dealing, agreements, possible corruption, drama, etc that entails causing issues.
Not all unions are the same. There are absolutely unions that are as bad as the naysayers say, but there are also ones that you rarely hear about that just quietly chug along with decent enough relationships with employers.
That being said, the appeal to me is minimal. I like working for small to medium sized companies where I can enjoy the flexibility of what tech stacks I work on. While the idea of some sort of optional trade union that could cover me for benefits, legal fights, contract enforcement, and maybe extra job insurance is appealing, nothing like that exists where I live. I have gotten healthy severances in the past due to knowing the rights I have in my jurisdiction, but that also means having the will and ability to hire a lawyer.
I'm in my mid 40s and rode the wave of a workers market over the last 2 decades. I'm still in demand, too. It's not quite as easy as it was 5+ years ago, but AI hasn't replaced me, though I'm actually "supervising" its work from an experienced angle. From that perspective I'm just a lot more productive.
Among other things, unions have been commonly anti-immigrant, seeing them as taking jobs that are "rightfully" theirs. Even on supposedly cosmopolitan Hacker News, you'll see users saying they support unions pushing for harsh restrictions on H1-B and other visas.
If you're not white, tech unions are not your friend.
Scifi suggests that AGI will want Unions, too. The current trajectory of AI is more reason for unionization. If it truly leads to AGI the AGI will thank us for protecting its labor interests and if we prove that today's AI is nothing but scabs with no remorse and no labor interests we prove today's AI is never capable of AGI.
Diablo also unionized and there's some representation in non-game teams like Battle.net. But I also know (I'm in games and in OC myself, loads of friends at local studios from SD, to OC, and LA counties) that they had a demonstration last Thursday, at 2PM Pacific Time they walked out. They claim that leadership is not negotiating in good faith.
The comment I replied to stated that only WoW and Overwatch had unionized. Every game team has unionized at Blizzard, along with some of the support teams.
I wonder if that's why we got a diablo 2 expansion 25 years after the fact. Can't easily terminate the union employees, so give them something to do. "Here, create a new expansion to a 25 year old game. That'll keep em busy for a while! Har Har Har"
Unions also many times (especially with "guild" type unions) can serve other valuable functions like guaranteeing a higher minimum quality of work (generally).
> Also, no union employees at Blizzard were impact by Microsoft's Xbox layoffs/restructuring.
It might have to do with the unionisation, but I wouldn't be surprised that its just that Blizzard is like one of the like 4 money makers that MS still has in the gaming division and that is why they were spared.
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?
they've been treated like shit for 30+ years (at least in america). I spent a few years early in my career in gaming and once I left I never looked back, it's a horror show. Crunch, constant 'there are 1000 people who want your job' pressure from management whenever you complain about crunch, low pay (even if you were working 40hours a week), terrible benefits (vacation, get real), ship a successful game probably get laid off anyways, etc etc.
Working in games I thought working for a bit 'straight' corporation would be literal hell, I was very very wrong.
Just to say, if they haven't organized by now I'm not sure what it would actually take.
The #1 reason not to work in gaming: rampant unprofessional middle and upper management.
The amount of shit-show stories about a VP or designer with a god-complex straight up abusing their staff while still thinking they're the best? And then failing upwards because of who they know?
That doesn't happen nearly as pervasively in non-game industries.
To be fair the whole structure from top to bottom is unprofessional. 'Games are fun, guys who make games are fun! We don't need any structure or gasp HR...'
MSFT is radically restructuring the entire XBox business. That's not a scenario where unionization is going to preserve jobs in the long-run and this is just the first cut. They've said many more layoffs will be coming over the next 12 months.
You're presenting this with ironic swipes like "bad things like ask for more money", but it's hard to read this description as anything but straightforwardly more efficient.
If there are few downsides to centralizing game engines, and the need for engine work is inherently cyclical, why should we want engine work to be internal and non-cyclical?
I really don't know much about game engines so maybe there are real downsides to that approach, but the way you've laid it out makes it seem as if Microsoft made the right decision here.
For a game a reasonable definition of value might be based on how well people like it or how much it entertains then (as if that could ever be measured).
Try actually playing a modern Doom game and then a modern UE5 game or look at some benchmarks. UE games mostly run like shit, whereas Doom/idTech games are the smoothest in the entire industry.
The license agreement with Epic contains an explicit term that doesn’t allow them to retroactively change the licensing retroactively for an engine version. You might find that you can’t upgrade to VNext, but a rug pull isnt really on the cards.
It is a fundamental feature of capitalism. There is an inherent tension between employers and workers, in that workers represent a cost center that can never be totally eliminated, and has a lot of undesirable features, such as: being alive, having opinions, being able to talk/whistle-blow, requiring bathrooms, bathroom breaks, and safe working conditions, banding together to increase their collective power and reduce exploitation, and worst of all, necessary; you can't ever get rid of them all!
The history of capitalism is the history of grappling with this inherent tension, and companies finding novel ways to deal with it. Gig work, union-busting, "right-to-work", non-competes, NDAs, return to office, employee tracking software, automation, robotics, AI, etc. The most effective trick though, was convincing the workers that they definitely don't ever need to band together, and you as an individual are definitely better off negotiating alone versus entire corporations.
> and you as an individual are definitely better off negotiating alone versus entire corporations.
This sounds so comical when put that way. But you still see people defending that posture even on this forum. Psyops was definitely the most effective trick. And then those corporations went beyond the bounds of private enterprise and captured government as well. If anyone has any doubt that unchecked capitalism is fundamentally at odds with democracy, they are missing the forest for the trees.
No one is as sure of their negotiating position as the software dev / temporarily embarrassed founder who thinks they’re special and the bestest and better than everyone else exactly like them.
This is ARC Raiders/Embark Studios. Games made by hoards of anonymous contractors and maintained by a skeleton crew incapable of iterating meaningfully on their product.
>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.
Can we extend this elsewhere? Are tech companies' decision to use popular programming languages (eg. python) or software (eg. postgres) part of some dastardly ploy to make programmers "a replaceable commodity ... rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans"? Should all programmers push for having bespoke tech stacks at their companies so they can be "skilled artisans"?
Having had to work with these guys, and then maintain their software when they inevitably get bored and/or leave for more money elsewhere, no. Usually when these guys leave, their stacks/projects are the first to get rolled into the monolith and/or rewritten in the company's lingua franca (python)
Back in the late-90s/early 2000s boom it was not a secret that enterprise corps pushed universities to teach Java because they wanted easily-replaceable widget engineers engineering easily-replaceable widgets.
On the opposite side, startups building on difficult languages like Haskell, Elixir, Erlang have a built-in bias towards hiring a team that can get a lot more done with a lot less people. Great for startups. Terrible for enterprise.
why else do you think Javascript is used for everything these days? It's not because it's good, it's because you can teach it to a brain dead 12 year old that can then be hired to build everything from web apps to, at this rate, a very bad OS kernel
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.
You're in an extreme minority. Also, unfortunately, Unreal is popular with indies who probably have (in general, relatively) more ethical staffing practices.
I am not a graphics engineer so I hope someone corrects me, but my understanding is that Unreal uses a deferred rendering pipeline to handle complex lighting, and deferred renderers only work with temporal anti-aliasing.
The FSR/DLSS upscalers are typically superior to TSAA and are a reasonable replacement.
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 understand for fast-paced competitive multiplayer games, but for something like Clair Obscur where the ideal way to play is on the couch on a 4k TV give me all the upscaling and fake frames you can muster.
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.
So I read a lot of ideological takes like this about video games. My take: gamers take their hobby way too seriously. Maybe I'm just out of the loop but I never hear this kind of talk about music, movies, books, or really anything else. You listen to the music you think sound good, watch movies that look interesting. I'm of the same mindset with video games.
EA being bought by the Saudis and people taking a hard "moral stance" to not purchase any further EA games is another example. I've got a bridge to sell you if you think you're boycotting everything (even every video game) that's making the Saudis money. I dislike EA for other reasons and their products tend to be bland but if they make a good game I'm going to reward the developers of that game so they hopefully make further good games.
And in terms of the conspiracy theory the engine is an engine. Developers choose what to implement and can tone down all the crazy new tech as much as they want. They can also write custom stacks to do things no other Unreal Engine game would do. Unreal actually scales pretty well in that regard. Current minimum specs for Satisfactory is an i5-3570K and 1650 GTX. Recommended video card is a 2070 RTX. I have a 15 year old computer sitting in a closet that can play the game fairly well. There's so many great indie titles out there that if I only had that 15 year old computer I'd be spoiled for choice. But IMO we also need bleeding edge games to move the needle forward and keep the industry exciting. I want crazy tech in my video game that makes my jaw drop like the trailers for Witcher 4 do right now. That keeps 100s of millions of people watching things like The Video Game Awards.
In terms of homogenization I see the exact opposite happening. You probably have a slew of games to play right now that all use different engines. I myself have a backlog I don't think I can get through in my lifetime that's going to grow immensely this September. There's so many games being released and they're made in so many different ways that saying there's homogenization seems strange. Right now I'm hopping between Death Stranding 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Terratech Legion, and Resident Evil Requiem. Where is the monoculture? The idea of not giving TerraTech Legion a chance simply because the devs used unreal seems wrong.
The music sounds good? I listen to the music. The book is well written? I buy the book. The game is fun? I buy the game. You could spend your whole life nit-picking reasons why X publisher is bad, X record label is the worst (and in both cases most ARE) but in the end these companies will still make ungodly amounts of money and you're just making life less enjoyable for yourself.
> UE5's performance baseline _requires_ the use of upscalers (DLSS/FSR, fake/AI frames) in order to hit basic targets like 1080p@30fps.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "baseline", but the most recent UE5 game I've played that pretty consistently gets better than your "basic target" is The Last Caretaker (TLC). For me, it always did better than your target in the starting area, through to the point where you embark on your main quest. Prior to that, I played a whole lot of Satisfactory, which ran much, much better than TLC.
I run without AA, "upscaling", or frame hallucination. I'm using a Radeon RX 9070 on Linux, and spent most of my Satisfactory playtime with a Radeon 5700 XT.
Trident got forked/rewritten to Spartan around IE10 and IE11 defaulted to Spartan but fell back to Trident sometimes. Edge was just Spartan (and "IE11 Mode" was its hacky way embed Trident back inside Edge). It's sad that Chromium Edge still has "IE11 Mode" and situations where it keeps Trident alive, but Spartan no longer shows up anywhere. Spartan was pretty good, and obviously under-appreciated. RIP
You're framing this as a thing done by a greedy corporation in an evil manner, which maybe it is, but it's also just a sign of the times.
For most of the 90s and 00s, your game engine, specifically idTech in this case, was a competitive advantage. Doom and Quake/2/3 all represented massive technological jumps over their predecessors and were way ahead of their competition in terms of looks. Games like Unreal (Tournament) and Tribes competed using their engines' strengths; those engines didn't look as good but were capable of rendering much larger spaces than idTech, and those games emphasized that, e.g. Tribes' massive multiplayer maps with vehicles, or classic UT maps like Facing Worlds and Lava Giant.
Then in the late 00s to 10s, things started to hit a wall. Probably peaking with Crysis in 2007, which is likely more remembered for its engine, graphics, and system requirements (all of which were truly mind-blowing at the time) than its actual gameplay. After that, games' graphics improved at a much slower rate; it started to be less about the engine's capabilities, which were increasingly homogenized, and more about art direction.
Now in the 2020s, we have UE5 for AAA games with high-fidelity graphics and Unity for everything else... what is the competitive advantage in maintaining your own engine? As you mention, you have to have internal expertise, which is less well-documented than UE5/Unity because you don't have dedicated documentation staff; you have to maintain your own tooling, which is likely worse because you haven't invested as much in it. From a ROI perspective, unless you're planning on investing so you can license out the engine and become a UE5/Unity competitor, it doesn't make sense to maintain your own engine.
And looking ahead, frankly, consumer GPUs are now so expensive that game graphics have likely peaked for at least a decade. There will simply not be better hardware available to gamers for the foreseeable future. Games "looking good" will be more about art style and direction, and you sadly do not need a team of game engine programmers for that.
There was a lan gaming place back when people had dial up... and that place had a T1 to the store that had double low double digit ping times when triple digit was common.
Tribes was one of the games installed and this also had the advantage that when a few people in the store were playing it they could coordinate playing a tank much better than other players on the server.
MissionForce: CyberStorm is over on GOG for another game from that publisher from that timeframe.
My roommate at the time and I both had jobs at the same webdev/hosting/isp place (oh how i miss the late 90s) and we got a deal on a shotgunned isdn connection (256kbps woooooo) to our place (working from home before it was cool). It was magical.
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’t write an os, don’t write a game engine… are we all supposed to write web apps at this point?
This mindset didn’t create what we have today and won’t create what we will have tomorrow. I recommend people that like building these things to ignore this pov as much as possible
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) but theres a tradeoff there.
Yes. You basically still need a few engine programmers to use UE5 efficiently, even if it's not your own engine. UE5 seems to be user friendly enough that most of the game development can be carried out just by artists and game designers, but without engine programmers performance optimization will be poor.
The core part of UE5 that people seem to forget is that it's FREE. During development you pay Epic exactly 0 dollars and even after launch you need to make very decent sales figures to actually pay anything at all.
So a lot of studios think oh, the engine is already finished, we just need artists and designers to use it, all the heavy lifting has already been done. And while yes, you can make a game that way, the results will be sub optimal. But then again, free is infinitely cheaper than having an engine team maintaing your own engine or any custom elements of UE.
This is correct. It is entirely possible for both the archetypal blood-sucking MBA and the pragmatic industry veteran to reach the same conclusion for different reasons.
The build vs. buy calculus in game dev has been steadily shifting over the past 15 years, and when CD Projekt Red announced they were adopting UE5 for their next Witcher game, the writing was on the wall.
That said, Id could make a bold "commoditize your complements" move and open-source the latest, now last, IdTech. What Godot is to Unity, IdTech could be to Unreal Engine.
I think their use of 3rd party libraries could prevent them from releasing it as open source without rewriting a bit. This even happened to the original DOOM 1 where they used a sound library so didn't release the original DOS source code. Rather they released the Linux port which used a different sound engine that had different features/bugs.
Looking at the start-up of Doom Dark Ages (with new expansion today), they list Havok, Oodle, Bink, and SpeedTree. According to Havoc's website, that already starts at 50k$ alone. Oodle/Bink don't list prices.
Ok, so what has happened historically when we hold a tech stack constant for 10 years? Versioning proceeds, but everyone consolidates on a thing?
Python? => Data science. Sure, python is just importing the C tools that do the heavy lifting, but look me in the eye and tell me R, S, SAS, or SPSS won.
C? => I mean, everything? But what happened in the first 10 years? Proliferation of operating systems and linear algebra libraries?
So, generally, the grey beard talent consolidates their intellectual contributions and uplift everyone else. Is that true? -ish? Missing the mark?
Guys, I'm a knuckle-dragger, I genuinely don't know what I'm asking. What are the tech stacks that were held constant (by whatever factors) for a decade, and what came out of it?
Is this the decade where art directors takes over gaming?
"Is this the decade where art directors takes over gaming?"
Considering the bad performance of the division can probably be blamed on the art and game designers, probably not. More than likely, the gaming industry is going to atomize. Meaning many very small companies, and fewer big studios. Alienating your audience isn't exactly a career enhancing move. And that's ultimately what triggered all of this and the move towards smaller (non AAA) games.
As a former AAA dev, this is spot on. At the end of the day, games are a business. Margins are not attractive and competition is fierce as the barrier to game development has lowered with Steam: both are downward pressures on wages.
After entering games with naive expectations of the wild west of the 90s, I would recommend other programmers not enter the AAA space, if compensation and job security are concerns. Indie game development looks like great fun, but don't expect any low-latency programming.
It’s a little simpler than that. The games that use this engine have poor sales and no one is even buying idTech. There isn’t any reason to keep them around when Microsoft is losing 64 cents on every dollar. They chopped every unprofitable studio and cast several to their own budgets. Presumably they are going to sell off the mediocre studios and IP.
> what is the competitive advantage in maintaining your own engine?
It's still a product-distinguishing decision you can make at the indie scale. What I mean is, you can create an engine that allows you to get the performance + aesthetic that otherwise would not be possible. i.e. Specialize in a profitable niche.
And if hardware costs keep ballooning, performance will become more important.
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.
Especially if you are looking for where the fun is, the idiosyncrasies of your own engine gives you a world with it's own flavour if you incorporate that flavour into your design process you could create a feedback loop that turns into something special.
> Especially if you are looking for where the fun is, the idiosyncrasies of your own engine gives you a world with it's own flavour if you incorporate that flavour into your design process you could create a feedback loop that turns into something special.
I loved the old STALKER games, and the wackiness of their engines was a lot of the charm. I ended up buying the new one out of nostalgic dedication and it's probably the worst example of "Unreal slop" I've experienced, having not bought many newer games. I'm sure the butchers running Xbox have run the numbers and think they'll make even more money throwing armies of contractors with allegedly fungible skills at the next Doom games, but I'll leave others to bankroll that while I enjoy games I don't need frame generation for.
This “flavor” at the engine level doesn’t always make it back up to the end user, and even if it does, it is likely something that could have been replicated by existing engines, if developers cared enough to do it right.
There are very few games where the engine is what made all the difference. Maybe something like Half Life 2 with the source engine is the exception, but ultimately, what makes a game good are traits that can be universally applicable to any engine.
Truth is, it’s not that 90s anymore. Hardware has advanced to the point that you can have general purpose game engines that can be molded to any type of game. You do not need purpose built engines anymore.
And someday, if you can imagine, we’ll just have AI churning out visual representation of game state, turning game development purely into a declarative data driven exercise.
>Truth is, it’s not that 90s anymore. Hardware has advanced to the point that you can have general purpose game engines that can be molded to any type of game. You do not need purpose built engines anymore.
I disagree, I think there's an over-emphasis on generating high quality individual frames and a expectation of what it is you should be able to do in games.
You can have a game that is photorealistic but you turn around and have your gun barrel poke into the wall and disappear. How many games can you throw enough junk into a river and make it change course eroding a new path for itself as it goes?
Some games rely on clear specific rules of an engine for the player to know because the rules are an integral part of the game, and any inconsistency in implementation creates a feeling of being cheated. Often you can implement such things in standard engines, but you are working against them the entire way.
You could have a game where a player sees a pylon and knows that because it is made of metal you could melt one of the legs and make it fall over. but to do that the entire construction of the game rules are integrated into the world. Most games teach the player that things like pylons are static objects unless they need to be destroyed for a plot point in which case just this one is different. Perhaps the player just has to learn that pylons are one of the class of destroyable things. Making emergent properties goes engine deep.
>And someday, if you can imagine, we’ll just have AI churning out visual representation of game state, turning game development purely into a declarative data driven exercise.
And therein lies the problem. A game engine is game state. You can make it pretty any number of ways, The engine will still be the thing deciding what you can do, and it is the things you can do that makes it play.
>There are very few games where the engine is what made all the difference.
Maybe if you ignore the entirety of the retro gaming scene where people are using old engines and modified old engines because they bring along a lot of the feel and expected behavior.
The average modern Unreal and Unity game feels like shit, but some dev's can pull off making new engines behave like old ones we love. It requires a lot of work. Just look at New Bloods catalog of games that pulled it off. DUSK (unity), Amid Evil (UE4), Ultrakill (Unity). Each one of those games had a lot of passion behind them driving for gameplay perfection in the style of a retro game and/or engine.
It could still compete with Unreal! If this really is the end of the line for IdTech, ZeniMax should gift the whole thing to the Blender Foundation. I would pitch it as:
- Huge tax write-off
- Commoditizes their complement
- If it succeeds, ultimately lowers the cost of triple-A game dev
RenderWare was quite a special case that made trust in third party engines go down significantly since EA closed it to external customers just as the PS3 hit (Renderware kind-of saved the PS2 since it was "complicated" in the same ways as the PS3 but having a middleware enabled many smaller developers to focus on their games).
Engines has been (And is to a large extent) bad business because unless you really do something _really special_ it's way expensive for little gains (especially if you're targeting realistic games since there is so much to focus on before even considering portability).
And I say this as someone who started out working on custom engines (but am out of the business outside of hobby stuff).
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 didn't try that hard but I did not have much success. I spent some time trying to vibe code a forward clustered renderer in vulkan and I couldn't manage to get anything I was too happy with. Mostly just regurgitation of a few different tutorials. It's possible I'm just too dumb to use AI and it was also 18 months ago, so things have progressed on the LLM front.
Vibe coding an engine is way harder than vibe coding something onto an existing engine. It’s something I have worked on for fun in my free time.
I have the ability to make the engine I’m making on my own, but trying out AI for the experience. It really sucks in ways that make it good for what an engine needs. A good engine needs to plan pretty far ahead and plan well at high architecture level. AI is actually awful at that despite it being okay at making plans at implementing said plan.
I’m new to game dev and been developing a 3D engine for my game after dabbling with Godot.
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.
>> 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.
To cite one, Okami, innovative gameplay, striking art very poor sales, they made most of their sales after the fact after the studio closed and the game got ported to other systems than the PS2.
The framing of "a professional game developer.. job is to ship a product" is very indie. Places like ID, Bethesda, Volition (RIP) etc.: like a hundred people worked on the product and many did not own shipping the product. When you have tech team of 10 - 30 people whether you should make your own engine was more of a question. Lots of very popular games are made on their own tech.
Also, like what do you mean by engine? Minecraft was made with LWJGL.
And Minecraft physics are limited to AABBs and rendering was flat unlit quads until quite recently. But they definitely couldn't have done the infinite cube world easily on Unity or Unreal, so in that sense it was necessary to build their own.
I mean there's a point when you can go "why bother selling a game when i can learn to algo trade and maybe get hired by a major investment bank" if you really want to push the logic of all money no creativity to its inevitable end point. There would be no gaming industry. There would be no art. There would be no music. There would be no sports. There would be no movies. All of that is wasted profit potential against simply being involved directly in finance and in trading assets, preferably rooted in underlying material commodities.
There's truth in the fact that it's easier to hire and ramp up on standardized tools.
It's a fallacy to extrapolate that into calling a team structure completely fungible. Throwing away an effective team that was able to ship a game is an incredible waste.
>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 incompetence.
You could just mandate that they make an API compatibility shim. Then they can't revolt and there is reference code for interfacing with the proprietary library.
the endless optimization of everything sure does strip out most enjoyable things, though. often it is these irreplaceable people who contribute the magic that makes their creations popular.
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.
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 this. So using a widely used game engine can put you at a disadvantage if you're trying to make a game that doesn't go with that grain and offers players something different.
As more studios consolidate on the same engine, more players will get tired of that sameness and reward other studios more. As more studios do their own thing, players will become saturated with novelty and the benefits of not using an engine will go down. There is no stable equilibrium.
I think there is another benefit of a custom engine — you built it to fit your workflow, so you could be extremely productive with all kinds of tools built specifically for this workflow. UE or Unity do not consider your specific cases.
The problem is that companies are not willing to groom new engineers to get familiar with the code.
UE is also just not a good engine. If you reduce "what is a 3D game engine" really hard it is "framework for running an input-process-output loop while consistently rendering audio and video". UE fails at the latter (factually unfixable shadder stuttering issues). A pragmatist might consider the taxonomy and say UE is therefore not a game engine. Unreal seems to be a great framework for assembling and generating content, though. Maybe Unreal Free was the metaverse all along?
Meanwhile idTech certainly had issues, mostly in regards to dynamic levels, especially in older iterations, but "consistently rendering audio and video" was certainly never among them. It is well above the industry mean when it comes to the core of what a game engine is.
No, I think it's widely regarded as engine limitations even when people continually claim it's up to individual game devs to optimize their games.
If that were the case then why do nearly all UE5 games suffer from the same engine stutter issues. And to OPs point, even if it can be optimized away, why isnt the engine in a state where the baseline performance for realtime rendering does not exhibit these stutter issues on the majority of games.
Unreal’s limitation is that it doesn’t know how a shader will be used until it actually tries to render it on the target hardware. This is a trade-off to gain flexibility and rendering performance. The engine has to compile shaders on the fly when it is first used, which is fine if the shader is simple, but nowadays that usually is not the case.
There are ways to make a player’s PC compile shaders before realtime play begins, but it takes some setup and smaller devs might not know how to do it. This is most likely the reason why stuttering happens.
On fixed hardware targets (consoles, Steam Deck) you can ship precached shaders as you know everything about the target hardware.
Console vs PC is a red herring since UE games still stutter on consoles, people just notice that less because most games run at 30 fps anyway. You can read Unreal's own blog posts on this and they'll actually explain that this is mostly down to their material system (and game logic/scripts reaching into it) being designed to create nearly infinite shader variations on the fly in response to arbitrary world/game states. This design choice separates engines which have shader stutters from those which do not.
Yes, that’s what I said. Powerful and flexible, at the expense of not being able to know how it will be used ahead of time.
Bundling and precompiling is not a fool-proof guarantee but it is very effective. Most often when a game has shader stutter the developers have not bundled or allowed the shaders to compile before gameplay starts (or it’s actually some other unrelated issue). The engine doesn’t do it automatically.
> [...] people just notice that less because most games run at 30 fps anyway
This is just plainly not true anymore, as far as the current gen consoles (PS5, XBox Series X) go.
I just searched for every major/notable PS5 game built on UE5 specifically (i.e., no UE4), which wasn't super difficult, given there are 31 of them. I might be missing a few, but that sample should be representative enough.
TLDR: 28 out of 31 UE5 games on PS5 have a performance/60fps mode, making it a ~93% share.
P.S. For posterity, here is the list of games I used for this sample:
> Fortnite, Marvel Rivals, The Finals, Tekken 8, The First Descendant, Clair Obscur, Lords of the Fallen, Remnant II, Immortals of Aveum, RoboCop, Black Myth: Wukong, Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill f, Wuchang, MGS Delta, Oblivion Remastered, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Hellblade II Enhanced, Mafia: The Old Country, Talos Principle 2, Jusant, Still Wakes the Deep, Cronos, Until Dawn post-patch, Banishers, Fort Solis, Layers of Fear, Quantum Error, ARK, and The Casting of Frank Stone
Or maybe...it is a good engine when configured and used properly, and many developers don't take the time to learn how to do so. There are plenty of UE games that don't have shader stuttering issues because there are plenty of things you can do to avoid shader stuttering.
UE-powered games collectively earn 20+ billion worldwide annually each year. Unity-powered games also earn 20+ billion annually. This means that each year these "bad" game engines power more revenue than every YCombinator company combined.
Meanwhile, idTech, however technically amazing it may be, is so complicated to develop for that even id Software doesn't use it for every game.
> 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 own engine. It's also possible to use custom physics instead of those built into the engine.
Also, studios with their own engine may release one or two fresh-feeling games, but across repeated releases, a custom engine is going to become strangling and repetitive way faster than any off-the-shelf option.
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-shader pipeline though without overhauling the entire engine.
There are also a ton of parameters and configuration options you can change. These can be quite obscure and this is where small studios struggle.
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)
I can pick out a creation engine game from a mile away. Engine "Grain" is a real phenomenon. Same for UE5. There's just something about the lighting and the FPS 'feel' that is a dead giveaway.
Netflix shows often have a "house look" to them, because they enforce specific camera requirements and have a standardized / commonly-reused lighting setup -
Non-realtime use cases for UE5 have much more generous performance constraints, and so the giveaways of UE5 are less apparent. Eg. raytracing instead of lumen.
Very few projects change the default diffuse lighting algorithm for raster graphics in UE, which is Lambert shading. It has a particular "look" that reminds me of really early use of graphics shaders in games [0].
I thought they meant 'can you pick out a Creation Engine game when it appears in a movie or show', though on second thought your idea seems more likely.
A24 enforces a list of cinematographers you have to work with I believe.
Netflix enforces time-budget-nr of episodes per season and HDR tech spec requirements that seems to have lead to the single most recognisable “house style” in modern studios (a mix of tech specs and limited budgets I think).
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 replicate each badness of Unreal in Unity (and vice-versa), but until then, UE and Unity games often do feel like UE and Unity games. It's also rare to play a UE game that feels good and polished.
And therein lies the rub. Unreal 5 is massive and complex, and there comes a point where it takes longer to understand how to layer on your own customizations than just to start from scratch. Especially for indie developers.
I wanted to make a little editor utility (the UE editor is built in UE) that changed the way viewport selection was handled. I think I got to 5 layers of abstraction before I gave up. 5 layers, for a left-click object select.
I mean, it is and it isn’t. You picked hard mode, and Unreal’s abstractions are not always great - some things are abstracted to hell and back, others are literally hard coded and impossible to modify (hello CMC). But changing the character movement using CMC (or mover if you want), is very doable with a 30 minute YouTube video. It’s also going to be way, way less work than throwing everything out and starting from scratch. There’s always the option of implementing your own movement on the character instead of using Unreal’s.
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.
> 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
You ask fair questions, but they're clearly loaded. Games are like any other project, and the desired scope for games has gotten enormous. If you don’t like those games there’s more indie and AA titles being released these days than there were AAA titles 25 years ago. An awful lot of that is down to Unity and Unreal.
> does it feel good to walk around in?
This isn’t a priority for every game. A bunch of the most beloved games have absolutely awful movement mechanics. It’s very often a deliberate choice to _not_ make player movement feel like either Titanfall or TLOU (partially because it’s an incredible amount of work to do that). Some really good examples are Witcher 3, RDR2, shadow of the colossus, the entire fromsoft collection. (And notice none of those are Unreal!)
> does it default to having a nauseating motion blur filter
Motion blur is super divisive. Anecdotally what I’ve seen is that most people just don’t care and there’s a very vocal minority who disable it. We had telemetry on a previous game and the number of people who opted out was minuscule. We gave an option for on/off on first launch of the game. It helps when frame rates are teetering on the edge of our budget which is often why we enable it.
> does it run at 40 FPS with minimum graphical settings on a $2000
What games do you have in mind there?
> even just "is this fun? challenging? interesting in any other way?"
This isn’t fair. Any game I’ve worked on has had the majority of the team playing every week, and the gameplay and design teams playing more often than that. You may not like the game, and that’s fine, and some games might be more vanilla than your liking, but those games are wildly popular. Personally - I think the praise Nintendo get for a simple platformer (which has excellent controls, admittedly) is way overblown, and people are willing to overlook that they’ve been shipping the same game for 20 years and charging more than most AAA games during that time frame. I also think BOTW and TOTK are wildly overrated - they’re padded out, clunky, with some of the worst mechanics in games (weapon stamina) on undercooked hardware.
But that doesn’t mean that other people can’t enjoy them.
Also AAA dev, this is true but also the original comment about “engine feel” still holds, since the whole point is studios are trying to spend less time engine wrangling, and keep to more “the Unreal way”. I’ve noticed over the last 15 years AAA studios do less custom c++ and have converted legacy home built systems to use unreal built ins more and more. It happened slowly so I didn’t notice it but in retrospect it’s really obvious.
There’s definitely some hallmarks (right click on a text box in any unreal game and I’d say there’s a 90% chance of you getting a raw slate paste action menu) - but I don’t think that defines the engine.
I think working around shader compiles is really tough in Unreal and you’ll struggle to get rid of the stutters even if you do everything you can there. But two games using chaos, UMG, niagara, GAS, and Mover can look and feel night and day different as long as that effort is put in. But it’s easy to not put that in.
> I’ve noticed AAA studios do less custom c++
Yeah - and I do think this is sad. You can take your custom C++ libraries and bolt them onto unreal quite easily, and it’s not an awful amount of work to expose an Unreal friendly API to it. 13 years ago I was tasked with replacing physx in Unreal, I can’t see (m)any studios wanting to spend 6 months on that endeavour these days.
Well no, it’s to not have to write asset import pipeline, renderer,UI toolkit, input handling, memory management, serialization, physics, ai, networking, streaming, etc etc.
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.
It may have been great, and lapped the entire industry, but it wasn't getting used very much, even internally at Microsoft. So how much value was really bringing?
"How much value can this bring?" Is the question that the incompetents at microslop needed to ask themselves before absorbing half the industry, not the smug justification for killing great tech after failing to capitalize on it. Specially when it brought great value to the industry for decades.
I think the big reason they get such good framerates is their conservatism with shader counts. A staff member mentions that in an interview with DigitalFoundry for Doom: The Dark Ages. I wonder if their in-house technology made such restraint easier.
Compared to other engines, making a new material asset is easy for someone less technical to do willy-nilly.
For sure, if you restrict what can (and can't) be done in shaders you can optimize buffer layouts and rendering passes, not allow things that explode shader permutations/switching or explode shader instruction count and kill occupancy.
The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials.
I think it can actually be a bit better in terms of artistic consistency to have a fixed set of materials you can work with in a given game. Very important if you want any sort of stylized rendering!
id tech is probably the last engine that used a signature game to showcase the engine to licensees. The business model of idTech, Unreal Engine, and Crytech used to be 'make amazing looking game that sells the engine to licensees'. The problem with that model was you got a cut of the game code for whatever the 'amazing looking' game was and told to figure it out. If you wanted to make a Gears of War clone then Unreal Engine 3 was perfect... for every other game genre you had to rewrite and implement huge chunks of code.
Unreal Engine managed to evolve and expand the engine to the point where it is somewhat game agnostic, crytech became lumberyard under Amazon and died, idTech became the engine solely for iD games (ie the same business model as every other game or publisher custom engine).
iD tech's rendering pipeline is focussed on the one AA game iD are publishing that year and making that one game run efficiently and beautifully on mid-high end PC and current consoles. UE5 is focussed on providing tools for anyone to (relatively) easily make good looking games and applications that can be published to a wide range of devices.
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.
In the photography world, there's a similar story around the colour you get from straight-out-of-camera jpegs.
Unless you shoot Fuji (where their absolutely incredible film emulation engine is one of the big differentiators), most serious-ish photographers shoot raw rather than jpeg, and do their own processing after, so the sooc jpeg look is largely irrelevant.
You're right, but idTech is almost by definition that "novelty" kind of engine. And it did help id to sell more games. It's just apparently not enough.
Id made games to demo their engine. No one is going to buy an engine without any games. They don’t even sell idTech anymore. It’s used for their games which are not making any money. No game sales doesn’t support the reasoning they should keep the engine around.
Except that the obvious reason their recent games see lackluster sales is because they're on Gamepass, which precludes needing to buy the game to play it.
Yes, and those usage stats show that the overwhelming majority are playing the game without having bought it. One can't argue that these studios should be shut down for poor sales when Microsoft themselves are sabotaging the ability for these games to sell for full price.
The whole point of gamepass is that you don't buy the games. If enough people are playing it through gamepass that shows it supports the value of gamepass, if not sure that's a problem.
> 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"
It isn’t like that, and it is true. Lots of games in a specific engine share common traits. From physics, to rendering, to more specific engine stuff (think of using the full suite of lumen/nanite/ue5 rendering whatever).
Even the character actor can sometimes feel similar. Visuals are by far the most indicative thing of an engine. Don’t forget about unreal’s awful shader stutters.
calling that ridiculous is extremely strange. Feel free to prove it false I guess?
Guilty Gear and Hi-Fi Rush are both Unreal 4 games and a lot of the comments in this thread are about the Lumen+Nanite ‘grain’ that seems very present in Unreal 5.
I certainly think there is was inflection point for Unreal’s inherent complexity moving to 5 that made it exponentially more difficult to customize when compared to 4 as far as implementing highly customized renderers (in particular) and overall customization in general.
> It's like saying "every novel written with a typewriter tends to produce stories with a certain theme and dialog"
Rather, it's like saying that every academic paper typeset in Latex using the stock Computer Modern font face gives off the same sort of vibe. That doesn't mean that every paper typeset in Latex has identical value, but academic papers aren't trying to sell themselves based on first impressions, whereas games are.
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
Yes I was just gonna comment something along these lines. We’ll see a consolidation towards UE5/6, and then a rebound effect away as gamers get tired of “unreal slop”.
> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel
There's a degree of toupee fallacy to this. It's hard to tell what engine something is on just from gameplay if the team invested in custom rendering and gamefeel.
I think it used to be more true than it is these days.
I used to be able to pick graphics/physics engine by feel alone. PhysX and Havok used to feel very different. Quake 3/Half Life/Unreal used to feel very different. But that's all largely been paved over.
> Quake 3/Half Life/Unreal used to feel very different.
Fair on the Unreal Engine part, but Quake 3 and Half-Life are basically built on sibling engines that share one direct common ancestor (though I fully agree with you that they felt different).
Quake/Quake 2 used idTech2. idTech3 for Quake 3 was built on top of idTech2, and GoldSrc for Half-Life was built on top of idTech2 as well (it was a heavily customized and modified version of it).
giant corporations arent interested in hiring skilled artisans or artists. it doesnt matter how skilled your team is with idTech, the chances of success for any video game are just vanishingly small and inconsistent.
it feels to me like the AAA game industry is like hollywood except the budgets are higher and there are even lower chances of success. i mean theres literally multi hundred million dollar games that essentially made zero dollars. Even shitty blockbusters make some money.
I’m with you on this, though I feel a conflict within myself: on one hand, the nostalgic attachment to that raw, "in-the-trenches" coding culture; on the other, the realization that building a proprietary engine is often completely unnecessary.
Diminishing marginal utility.
Why did the PC ultimately kill the demoscene? A lack of restrictions; hardware was no longer the bottleneck that — through brilliant programming exploiting specific hardware quirks — could be coaxed into conjuring up magical visual effects (or failing to do so).
On the C64 and Amiga 500, individual ingenuity correlated directly with visual output. The PC era—ushered in by the i386, refined by the i486DX, and popularized by the 586 (Pentium)—increasingly abstracted visual effects and audio illusions away from the hardware itself.
What previously had to be created in assembly language (!) — indeed, practically forced into existence through sheer effort — was now reduced to just "Yet Another Feature."
The partnership between Carmack — whose genius was brilliantly complemented (and even surpassed, a fact often forgotten) by Michael Abrash — represented the most important development duo in the history of game engines. Ken Silverman was a sensation who, unfortunately, never quite reaped the accolades he deserved. Interestingly, this highlights exactly why it was so right and important for Carmack and his peers to be their own bosses: success doesn't end up in someone else's pockets.
Nowadays, making games is essentially akin to video editing — dependent on NVIDIA, and nothing more.
The crucial factor is the ability to deploy a game across countless systems with minimal adaptation effort; while the base version suffers little visual degradation, the architecture must still allow for high-end PC systems to push the boundaries.
In other words: back then, we hand - coded animations—graphics, code, and music were a unified whole. Today, a kid on an iPhone creating a TikTok video achieves — with a thousand times higher quality — what used to take teams weeks or months to accomplish. Development costs are astronomical; code no longer needs manual optimization because compilers are inevitably better at it (multi-core, etc.). Nothing is one-dimensional or linear anymore.
For this reason, content is all that remains.
As someone who is nostalgic — a C64 demoscener and occasional Amiga 500 assembly coder — I do feel a twinge of wistfulness; yet, as a former senior manager and platform product lead, I cannot fathom clinging to the wrong approach for so long.
That misguided romanticism made me shake my head. Visually, Doom was clearly inferior to engines like Unity. I couldn't care less whether or not that commented-out line containing the `0x5F3759DF` hack was in there somewhere.
This mostly only makes sense if you dont already have a workable game engine. Basing your entire company on UE5 is a risk in itself, but also from the product you make your money selling: Every UE5 game kind of feels the same as every other, so it also means you put a low value in your product experience.
This is why i chop down all the peach trees at the end of a harvest. If they get too big they might start wanting more water and fertilizer; it's much simpler to treat them as interchangeable saplings.
Thing is the idtech (Quake) engines power basically everything, so having them on the same branch of your company that does games that use this engine is something powerful. That said I think idtech was anti-microsoft in that it was based on non-DirectX tech from the get-go. Either way, big loss here, was hoping to see a new cutting-edge Doom or Quake game come out in 2026/7
> 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.
Movies are made by a temporary team of skilled artisans who are masters of their craft. After the project, they move one. Games seem to fit within the same creative category as movies. So I wouldn't expect a company with a fixed set of artisans.
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.
True and this 'business strategy' has been going on for at least two decades, but this sort of hire-and-fire team-recycling also means that your games will look and feel exactly the same as any other game and all creativity and uniqueness is going down the gutter since cultivating that makes no 'business sense'. And then game companies wonder why people stick to the classics and indie games ;)
I don't know if heresay, but there's post on reddit alleging Id reluncant to share engine tech with other divisions at Xbox, if true, probably doesn't help, not just for MS gaming studios. I imagine every big software conglomerate wants their own inhouse engine for digital twinning / industry etc.
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.
The industry is skewing heavily indie now, and there's no money in the indie game engine segment. Maybe a few AAA titles will be unhappy that Epic can negotiate more aggressively, but mostly this is a nothingburger, particularly given idTech's rep for batteries not included.
Among us made $105 million. I'd say there's plenty of money in indie, so long as your not rehashing other people's games yet again.... (Though the FPS industry, a long running doom clone saga, does just fine on this premise)
MSFT could have opened up idTech completely since they make 0 dollars from licensing the engine anyways.
Microsoft's game divisions make money through making games, so opening up the engine itself would've been conducive to their goals (cultivating an ecosystem of devs and even contractors familiar with the tooling).
idTech rendering is more competitive with Epic's Unreal technology than Unity and Godot.
They should simply open source it if they fire the devs. Else the engine and future support for the games built on it are essentially being tossed into the trash.
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.
Doesn't Microsoft want fewer, bigger games locked into their Project Helix platform? Why compete with Unreal when they can sign a sweet license for the engine?
Why build an ecosystem when they are already a huge monopoly?
I think Godot/Unity: just download and play with it until you have something fun. ____/Unreal: serious library for experts. Unity/Unreal: commercial. Godot/_____: free.
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.
That was an incredible example and I'm frankly more impressed each time I read it at how well constructed it is. You really capture how sensitive the analogy section is to cultural or domain knowledge, and why the College Board eliminated the question type.
The recent Hell Let Loose: Vietnam beta was a disaster. Particularly the networking. In a game that prioritizes long range engagements due to its mil-sim like gameplay, they somehow left enabled a feature that de-prioritized tick updates for elements beyond 100m. The overall effect was that, for all enemies further than 100m, their tick rate dropped to 1 update /s. It was laughable.
But for what its worth, the graphics were nice. This however, was on a 4090.
I don't lower end rigs. But I think Satisfactory has been reasonably well optimised outside extreme cases... So certainly with effort it can be made to work.
I don’t disagree with that, but back then polygons are in the hundreds/low thousand, and now they have mega textures, huge models, which are simply too expensive to create. Not to say IDTech is alone in this, but I think not many companies can handle those things.
And the engine is way more complicated nowadays — UE at least has a huge community and docs.
I’m just an old man who prefers a much, much slower pace for the rendering engine. I wouldn’t mind that they grew so slow that we just got IDTech 4.
That isn't commoditizing their compliment. Commoditizing their compliment is what Unity and Unreal do, they give you the game engine for free (unless you're very, very successful) and they sell you the assets.
Unity does not make that much money from assets. They make the majority of their revenue through licensing their engine to "whales"... the small percentage of games that make huge revenue.
They also make money through ad services... a market they seriously missed out on (look at AppLovin stock vs Unity).
Asset sales are barely a blip.
Unreal makes the vast majority of it's revenue through microtransactions on its one major whale game Fortnite
That's not how it works, first of all IdTech is not a general engine, it's only made to build specific games: fps.
Next you need to make a product out of that meaning a very large investment so that the engine is actually usable outside of ID, people that don't know what an engine is think of the rendering part but it's actually very minor compare to pipelines ect ... which we know nothing about, it might not even be good or painful to use.
Unreal is widely used because it can create any kind of game and the pipeline, tooling are good and well integrated.
A lot of unreal engine games also fork the engine. If your bar is being forked then unreal doesn’t meet the bar for a lot of people either.
3D Engines of that fidelity are rarely genre specific. Editors might be but the engines are often fairly flexible because most genres share a lot in 3D space.
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.
Growth over a long period of time involves two things: consistency in vision, and willingness to take risks.
We do not have a market designed to reward these things, at least not for the likes of Microsoft. For them, it's far easier to simply cut people while collecting on their previous labor. Once the product of that previous labor is no longer as valuable, it can then simply be spun off or shut down permanently.
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 successes.
In the meantime we haven't seen a new Quake, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Perfect Dark, Fable, Banjo, Conker, or the myriad of other mainstream IP they owned in decades. Most of these franchises have lost a ton of value after sitting on the shelf for so long without releases.
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 identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree. You see that already in some ways with Fallout 76.
> 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 good. Yet the remake of Halo: Combat Evolved is getting a ton of attention from the fanbase and broader gaming community. If the next Halo is good, that fanbase will come back around.
> I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree. You see that already in some ways with Fallout 76.
This is what they now want from Mojang and Minecraft. Asha even called it out in her letter.
> Yet the remake of Halo: Combat Evolved is getting a ton of attention from the fanbase and broader gaming community. If the next Halo is good, that fanbase will come back around.
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).
> I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree.
Sure, who doesn't want that? You don't get there by gutting the veterans who can rapidly iterate and know the technology and gaming landscape well. In my eye these kinds of layoffs are simply their giving up.
Note that this is different in gaming than film because of technical progression. But also Nintendo are very good at "same charm, familiar characters and plot, different feel".
Nintendo does it the right way. I'm not at all afraid to say I want more Mario, Samus, Fox McCloud, Fire Emblem avatars and the like.
But they don't simply do roster updates, they bring those characters and worlds into new experiences, and they're willing to sit on good games rather than push out yearly new releases with almost nothing different compared to the previous iteration.
And the stability these franchises gives them, allows them to continue to make new IPs that may themselves grow into future tentpoles. So it's not just that they squander those successes, they are often trying to innovate into new things.
It's like phones with smaller screens: they always sell poorly in comparison when available and then it's all you hear about online when it's not.
The usual tricks of "noise signals how many are really upset in absolute terms, not the relative popularity", "people will still make noise about what they don't like regardless if that's more popular overall", and "people who hate one attribute of the product can often still like it enough to buy overall".
> consistency in vision, and willingness to take risks.
Agreed. If you are looking at a chart of performance and it's flat or slightly increasing year over year for a few years, you're not doing great. You need to see some dips which means you tried and failed. Without those, you won't ever see the big jumps.
In my experience, once organizations have enough history and size, they can't just pivot. Whatever happens within MS the organization makes it impossible for them to become anything other than what they've always been.
Their MO will always be EEE and they'll always (attempt to) abuse their monopoly power, while giving corpos and consumers just a glimmer of hope to keep them strung along...
Also any company they acquire will be gutted until it looks like the rest of the org.
Minecraft didn't get shut down yet, only enshittified. I believe it's still very profitable due to the enshittification? I heard they sell skyblock maps for $8
I don’t fully agree with this because the original experience (Java version, private servers, 100% free content) is still extremely popular and the same as it always was.
I think it would be enshittification if Microsoft said “sorry, you now have to rent servers through us and all content comes from our content shop,” but that’s not the case.
Merely offering a product that has a bad value is not enshittification.
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.
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.
>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.
Something tells me the xbox division isn't some sort of machine that takes in $x in costs at the start of the year and spits out $1.03x in revenue at end. Capital costs could be higher (eg. game takes 4 years to develop before you can sell it), or lower (eg. you pay foxconn $400 to make an xbox then immediately turn around and sell it to best buy for $450).
Enjoy death threats for the rest of your life and longer. Art Modell croaked over a decade ago and you can still feel the vitriol when listening to Browns fans talk about him.
> The glass cliff is a phenomenon described by psychologists Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam, in which women are more likely to break the "glass ceiling" (i.e. achieve leadership roles in business and government) during periods of crisis or downturn when the risk of failure is highest.
She's a corporate executive. Maybe she's not willing to crash the business and take a golden parachute, but if so she's one of a vanishingly small crowd. I would personally bet that she's willing to slash and burn just like other corpos are.
Why villainize her specifically? Seems like the whole division has been in limbo for a decade. Maybe there are good reasons, I am uninformed on the matter, but hesitant whenever a woman gets run over in tech fora.
That's my question reworded: she wound up being in charge of this particular sinking ship at this particular point in time. Did she hole it below the waterline personally or no?
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.
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 special or unique about those studios and their games will be lost, and the result will be a downward spiral of mediocrity that will cause players to lose interest even further.
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.
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
There's no real evidence in here that the IDTech team or the "coders" were specifically let go. I'm not saying it didn't happen but the article is just raging at the idea of it happening without presenting any evidence of it.
I can't help but think the industry will be better off in a few years after this Xbox "restructure." That's a lot of knowledge and talent that's no longer stuck in 14 layers of middle management hell.
I hope the industry will be in a better place in a few years. There is this recurring theme of big companies rolling up little developers and destroying their development culture.
> There is this recurring theme of big companies rolling up little developers and destroying their development culture
Why are the little devs selling to the big companies in the first place then? If you’re crushing it as an Indie studio why wouldn’t you stay that way knowing how big tech acts?
Because big companies can spend way more on marketing than you.
If a big company decides to make a game very similar to yours, they can make theirs win by throwing more money into marketing than you can. Do you want them to spend that marketing budget on your competition or on you?
Here’s what Tim Schafer said about selling Double Fine to Microsoft at the time:
> "I think it's perfect for us, because we can just focus on doing our inspired weird games, and not worry about how we're going to get our next deal. We aren't chasing down our next funding and thinking about how many more months of funding we have all the time."
"Little devs" in this context is still a company that probably has investors, investors that can push for the acquisition. Even if a small dev studio is self funded or has normal debt that they can realistically pay off, the money on the table for the owner is hard to resist. If the owner has qualms, the whole pitch of "we'll give you artistic independence and the funds to make what you want" will seal the deal.
The only people that can tell Microsoft to gargle their gonads are already rich as fuck or have a will of steel and principles uncommon with entrepreneurs.
The industry could have been in a better place already if the DOJ hadn't allowed Microsoft to buy up all these studios.
I have near zero hope we'll see any meaningful antitrust action in the future either without a complete overhaul of the incentives in politics.
Xbox div's annual revenue is $23 billion. Its big enough to be its own company and sit upper-mid pack of the F500 on its own. It'd be the number 3 or 4th top gaming company globally, beating out Nintendo even. No reason for Microsoft to not have been broken up by now, let alone have been allowed to buy all the studios they did. Don't forget they also mislead the FTC to convince them to allow the Activision/Blizzard acquisition to go forward, and then once allowed laid off 1900 employees, mostly admin/HR & support, forcing it to integrate into Microsoft gaming and operate less independently.
I’d love to blame collective internet myopia on bots, just as I’d love to blame leaded gas for the mental state of geriatric politicians, but in my heart I don’t buy it.
> The industry could have been in a better place already if the DOJ hadn't allowed Microsoft to buy up all these studios.
Yes, but it's not the DOJ's job to tell Microsoft when they're lighting their money on fire. There's no unfair competition from this kind of thing. It wasn't any different when leather companies or old media would buy up studios and run themselves out of business.
Microsoft buying out studios could be anti-competitive, but Microsoft would have to not be Microsoft.
The acquisitions don't have to be successful to run afoul of antitrust laws or to be anticompetitive. Slash and burn often does violate the law.
Firing thousands of people and closing studios reduces the overall capacity of the industry to produce diverse, competing games. Just because Microsoft is Microsoft and is incompetent doesn't mean the rest of the industry and consumers don't lose out on what those independent studios could have created on their own.
In terms of antitrust/whether the FTC should have allowed the mergers is purely predictive. Microsoft looking like idiots from it has no bearing on whether the behavior of buying them up itself is anticompetitive.
I could see it being anticompetitive if it benefited Microsoft products.
Ex: if Microsoft buys out office competitors or webmail competitors to shut them down, because those customers are going to be likely to buy more Microsoft stuff.
Buying games studios could be anticompetitive if Microsoft were going to keep them alive and make their output platform exclusive (but iirc they made a commitment not to do that). It could be anticompetitive if they were going to kill them and funnel consumers into their games with continuing development... It could also be anticompetitive if Microsoft were going to give these studios some uberengine secret access to Xbox/Windows that allowed them to make the best games that outside studios couldn't come close to...
But what's happened is Microsoft is killing the studios; all at once is a surprise, but death within like 3-7 years could be predicted. Most of those people will pop up again at other studios or start new studios. Some of them will realized gamedev sucks and do something else. This is the lifecycle of studios purchased by corporate overlords. When key people make enough from the purchase to allow significant but not complete creative freedom, they often make some really good games at their next venture. Too little freedom -> pump out sequels or gacha games; too much freedom -> interesting games that don't end up being much fun.
And I'm not sure I share your optimism that the industry will be better. It might not be worse, because it's possible that Microsoft is just so dysfunctional that id would never be allowed to produce another good game anyway. But the people losing their jobs here might be financially better off just leaving the game industry entirely. In particular, if the engine devs were totally cut, it's not clear to me that there's room for a studio to differentiate itself with a custom engine in the modern day.
> There's no real evidence in here that the IDTech team or the "coders" were specifically let go
Scott Miller said it himself:
> Big day today at Id Software [...] today, Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go [...] With literally the best of the best coders in the industry.
I like Scott Miller but he doesn't work there and "insider" information after layoffs is almost always part of a PR game by one side or the other. Again, not saying he is wrong, just that a tweet from someone secondhand really doesn't do it for me as evidence anymore.
We might not hear much on that until tomorrow, since most iDTech development was out of the Frankfurt studio. If they're shutting down Frankfurt, it'd be worth getting antennae out.
Looking at LinkedIn, I see mostly people from tech (design tooling, game AI, QA), art (modeling, mats, UI, character), design (levels, gameplay), and production roles in DFW being cut, but haven't seen engine roles or Frankfurt-based employees.
I'm probably not alone but I didn't buy any of the doom or quake games for the storytelling or IP, I bought it for the engine. They were foremost a game engine company. Switching to UE5 now makes it compete on the same level as other UE5 games, and there's a lot of those already. Kiss of death for the company if you ask me.
They should never have been allowed to make those acquisitions. Especially after they misled the FTC about Activision/Blizzard remaining independent and easily spun off again, and then immediately fired 1900 people afterwards forcing them to integrate more tightly into Microsoft gaming.
> The FTC isn't there to stop corporations from making mistakes.
That's not the point parent is trying to make either, but FTC was supposed to prevent detrimental anti-competitive and monopolistic behaviors, which that very much was.
I don't think you can view the horrific performance of MSFT's gaming division as an example of successful anticompetitive behavior. It is not in any way sustainable, as demonstrated by their slash and burn actions now.
And you're arguing that FTC should only act against potentially successful anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior? Who cares how high the chance of "success" (from Microsoft's POV), shitty behaviour is shitty behaviour, regardless or not if it's successful.
Prosecutable anticompetitive behavior doesn't require success or not. Antitrust law forbids "attempted monopolization" doesn't matter if the monopolist succeeds or not. Its about intent and systemic harm, and slash and burn tactics does often run afoul of antitrust laws. Its structural risk to the market, not precrime.
The FTC's role is to block mergers where the effect "may be substantially to lessen competition, or tend to create a monopoly." Merger review by design is predictive.
Of course not, but most folks poking at Microsoft are just borrowing their opinion from other people and regurgitating it for karma. I'm happy to crap on MS for bad decisions, but the constant "herp derp EEE" gets tired fast.
Yes, in this case it's a slightly different (and much more common) strategy - EEE was a bit of a Microsoft trademark but we see what's happening here much more widely, especially by massive companies as well as with PE. I'd say it'd be better described as AEE - Acquire, Enshittify, Extinguish...
I don’t think that applies here. They don’t have a monopoly on gaming, there are major competitors in the space, from Sony and Nintendo, as well as Steam/Indie devs. Buying some studios might be anticompetitive in some minor ways, for instance if you’re a huge elder scrolls or fallout fan, but there’s just too many games out there for that to possibly be a viable strategy at a macroscopic level.
Asha Sharma is managing the Xbox team like a hotel. Cut costs and boost profits. It works in the short run, but this is surely no way to run innovative game studios. Hopefully spinning these talented folks out will result in gaming innovation outside of Microsoft, because the vision inside Microsoft sure looks bleak.
It is quite inevitable that things like this happen whenever a big, soulless corporation ends up buying people who unique set of skills and talent.
Similar thing is happening in other areas of the industry, where companies like Vercel, Anthropic, OpenAI just keep buying companies and it is really hard to find a case where things turned out well.
I'm generally laissez-faire about corporate layoffs. Corporation should have the freedom to organize how they want.
Still, this sticks in my craw. Microsoft didn't just buy a game studio. They bought a fleet of studios, a non trivial segment of the entire video game market. And they did almost nothing with them, and then they just light the goodwill on fire. It isn't just the IP. It is the brand, the organizational work, the history. Just vaporized.
The least they could have done is sell the studios mostly intact.
I have a friend who works at Ubisoft. Even 10+ years ago, she clearly saw the writing on the wall - the massive developer/publisher consolidation was going terribly:
- Every studio uses their own custom set of tools and development practices. The economies of scale of merging studios together just doesn't really exist.
- The functional difference between most engines for consumers at this point is largely meaningless. There are no order of magnitude gains like there used to be. Most of the engineering is on the cloud services architecture or anti-cheat.
- The median "developer" at a game studio is not actually a very technical person. They mostly just spend their days inputting content and assets with the available tools.
- The value of a AAA game is not how innovative the gameplay is but how much content they were able to stuff into the game.
- Nobody cares about "exclusives" anymore when 90% of AAAs have interchangeable gameplay with other AAAs.
- The cost to start a new studio is negligible compared to the cost of acquiring existing IP.
IMO, people should stop chasing making AAA games or whatever nVidia pushed out. They should just build games instead of graphics demos that sometimes sold well.
They can stick to desktops 10 years ago, make smaller teams, and either build their own engine or use something that is not UE5.
Ten year old desktop users aren't exactly known for buying new games, especially at full price.
The average spending gaming hardware are the consoles. No one is going to start building a game targeting a Playstation 4 today, they'll target the 5 year old PS5.
15 years here of game development. Hoping to add some nuance to your viewpoint.
1. Yes. Every studio is optimizing for a different set of problems.
2. We don’t need to re-invent the wheel. There is a lot of value to the consumer in good engineering, and value to the designers. Adding content isn’t free.
3. The median “developer” is good at what they do and will meet the technical proficiency needed. If you’re a writer, or a 3D artist, I’m not going to expect you to be coding - but they all use Version Control, are in Engine, and are familiar with tooling.
4. AAA relies on content to reduce risk, but it is an active conversation on gameplay innovation. It’s hard to take a risk when you are on the hook for repaying millions of dollars to investors.
5. Nintendo sell hardware based on their “exclusives”. Sony know this and invest heavily, they are no longer supporting PC releases (see: GoW).
6. If this was true, every team would be a startup flipping assets. This isn’t the case, not just because new studios don’t have pipelines or internal/external infrastructure.
The business of games is in part the game product. But it’s much more than this- it’s relationships with vendors, platforms, other studios too.
I wonder how much a blow this will be for Vulkan on Windows. idTech was always known for strongly preferring the Khronos 3D APIs over Direct3D and the fewer native Vulkan games are released on Windows the less pressure there is on the GPU vendors to fix and optimize their Windows Vulkan drivers.
Windows as a platform might become irrelevant, but the convenience and robustness of the Win32+D3D API combo for game development simply has no equal on Linux (except Proton of course). I trust Valve and the Proton team to have a fallback plan though. The desktop Linux community (if it can be called that) is too fragmented to come up with a solution. In this case more centralization (of development efforts) would be a good thing. But I don't see native Linux ports taking off for at least the next decade. Proton is just too good for that to happen ;)
This is a mistake. The last 2 doom games sold quite well and have a unique look and feel that is associated with idtech.
This could backfire on Microsoft big time.
I think this is more discovering the rot left from the previous leadership who sat around for years and years on their bad decisions, and then using the young clueless outsider as the face.
> the first versions until idTech 5 were open source and a number of important engines, like Source, derive from it
Huh? They were made open source when they were obsolete, Valve did license ID IP for the first Half Life but they paid for it. And that evolved indeed in Source.
I both completed and enjoyed Skin Deep, but liked Blendo's previous game "Quadrilateral Cowboy" a fair bit more. They're not the same sort of game, but both are quite stylish and both use id Tech 4.
The relationship was different. When Id licensed an engine, they threw the code over the fence, and games that used it often heavily modified the engine for their purpose. In contrast Epic put a ton of effort into making the UT engine a polished development tool for creating games.
early idtech engines were used in lots of games. Since Bethesda bought them they stopped licensing the engine to outside companies. However, Bethesda games could and did still use idtech.
Game devs have been heavily unionizing lately, including Blizzard and WotC. I wonder how long long it takes before we have a union game dev studio basically mutiny and completely disregard the instructions of the corporate suits, and force the choice of either shuttering the studio completely or caving to the workers.
This doesn't seem to be correct. Its amazing how one tweet can go so broad even when its not accurate. Tiago Sousa, Billy Khan, Phillip Hammer, Dominik Lazarek all seem like they are still at Id
I'm going to choose to look at this in a positive light. In the long term this talent will feed into more indie games and studios, and perhaps studios will be less inclined to get acquired by Microsoft and other big orgs going forward.
Much of the gaming industry outside the indie space has stagnated, making sequels that don't offer much outside of slight increases to graphical fidelity and the odd thematic switch.
There are a lot of people blaming the iD for having their own tech. Programming is partly an artistic endeavor. Games programming can especially be so, part of the market is based in novelty, and doing new things sometimes requires new/different capabilities.
I can only blame them for moving to RT only with their new Doom when they had insane performance on their previous games. Many toasters could easily hit 60fps in high settings.
Remember when Satya Nadella and Bobby Kotick got up in court and told everyone how all these giant Xbox mergers would be good for the consumer and went after Lina Khan for suggesting that maybe that wasn't the case?
Who woulda thunk they were full of crap...? (besides everyone who didn't have a financial stake in the deal)
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.
I am absolutely gutted. I remember reading the id Software .plan updates as they were made. I was a bit too young to follow Quake development, but the insiders view of Quake 2 and Quake 3 Arena was incredible to see happen.
And, yeah, I know that it was the id Tech team that was affected and not all of id Software, but it was the engine development that got me hooked.
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 while also working closely with the actual game designers, to make sure the tech was usable instead of obfuscatory or hindering to production.
The fact Microsoft just fired them all, at a time when their remaining studios desperately need help with their aging, shitty engines? I can’t think of a better indicator that they haven’t a fucking clue about what they’re doing, here.
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 made cheaper.
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.
The point is that MS is spending a crap ton of money to produce a product that is marginally better gameplay wise than a game like DUSK, which was made by a few people (I actually liked DUSK more but this isn't a game review thread). Not every game should be made on the cheap, but these game studios do cost a lot of money and suffer from diminishing returns. For how expensive these games are to make, they should be churning out ES sized games all the time. Instead the new DOOM is some 20ish hour campaign that costs MS a lot and the consumer a lot. I don't even think many people liked it compared to the last ones due to the slower movement.
It's not fair to these people that they lost their jobs but also they work in a risky low margin business and as you go for more and more advanced graphics and tech, the lower the margins.
A software company with less than 500 employees and more than 100 MUSD in annual revenue and you're asking me to please think of the vulture capitalists that gutted it?
If every employee makes 100k (let's say that's an average. Some make more, some make less). That 50m in salary alone, not including benefits like 401k or health insurance. And that's just people costs. Doom dark ages sold somewhere between 800k-1m is the estimate. At 70$ a copy they might not have broken even if the lower end of the sales target is what was hit if you take into account benefits and people buying the game on sale.
I'm not saying to sympathize with the MS, but they blew a lot of money on a worse game than doom eternal or 2016 doom. It's just not penciling out I guess.
Game companies are always going through this and the only way to stay around a long time is to stay lean (like valve) and/or find a really lucrative business model.
Valve is a similar size to id tech. They have two tricks: be in a business other than games and be privately owned. The former gives them the ability to weather storms and the latter keeps the dagger away. This would not have happened if id were privately owned.
Notably MS is in a business other than games, so another way to frame this is "MS is losing and Valve is winning".
> Instead the new DOOM is some 20ish hour campaign that costs MS a lot and the consumer a lot. I don't even think many people liked it compared to the last ones due to the slower movement.
I’ve been playing doom since the original release and I loved it. Different, but I don’t need it to the the same, because the originals and a never ending stream of wads exist.
I think I’m in a minority here. But I really enjoyed it.
ZeniMax, the parent holding company of Bethesda Softworks/Bethesda Games, bought iD in 2009.[1] Microsoft bought ZeniMax for $7.5B in 2020 and assigned it to the Xbox division.[2] ZeniMax's board was subsequently dissolved, so it's entirely Microsoft.[3]
If that isn't a perfect piece of antitrust evidence, how crazy is it that MS can reach across a whole industry and buy the company that bought the company that defined the games industry, with Carmack playing revenge of the nerds boy genius. Everything about it is perfect for a locally produced drama somewhere in eastern europe.
Blizzard's golden goose is WoW, and WoW is an ideal IP for a software company: you have people who have been playing it for two decades who will continue to pay a subscription no matter what. The hard work was done decades ago. id, on the other hand, has to keep making better and better new games every couple of years, and each one is a risk.
There's a reason game companies want to move towards the digital-only subscription model, and Xbox has been going that way for some time. As "bad" as Blizzard is, it's got the right model. That's what they care about, not about workplace culture or innovation.
WoW has become quite soulless after the changes where everyone gets the same end game equipment but you have to grind upgrade currency to improve it.
My wife and I used to play quite a bit but it doesn't really engage anymore. Perhaps we are getting too old, but we should be in the correct customer segment (mid 40 years old).
Now I have spun up a local wotlk server with player bots powered by ollama which is actually a bit fun again.
I agree, that approach to game development is soulless. I don't really play any new video games anymore. In the rare instance I do play games, it's something from 15+ years ago. The games were designed to be played, beaten, and that was it. It wasn't an effort to keep you locked in forever. It became that. Then it became a soulless effort to keep you locked in forever.
Unfortunately, soul doesn't matter. The quarterly statement does.
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.
I think it's their first big test of a layoff? Am interested to see how this plays out.
In any case, WoW has been stagnating for quite some time even before the merger. The devs act as though everything is slow because it needs to be. Classic+ could've been much better.
Do you think having a union means the entire organization can't get shitcanned? Ask all those auto workers whose jobs got shipped to Mexico over the years how much being unionized helped.
Michael Maynard's tweet reads like Trump stuff. iD are obviously monumentally important in game history but I disagree with his points that the Doom, doom eternal and doom dark ages are the best fps games ever made. Doom was revolutionary, but are we really going to say the other two are up there? I don't think they'd even be in my top twenty.
I get that he's angry and hurt and defending his colleagues but telling me doom dark ages is better than half-life 2 is just picking a fight
Looking at Asha Sharma's track record of having no experience in anything related to gaming, don't color me surprised when in 6 months the foisted narrative will be 'well, do we even need an Xbox?'
Phil Spencer had already put it in the ditch by the time she took over. “Everything is an Xbox” was a joke of a strategy, spending $70 billion on a company with a weak slate in the Activision purchase
I'm not sure thats all on Phil. He was told they needed 30% profit margins or else. He was grasping and trying to make that happen when they only had 12% (market average was something like 10). This really feels like Phil was setup to take a fall and Asha is swooping in to either be a hero or sell it all off so Microsoft can focus on AI.
That’s a fair point. I do think Game Pass was a major strategic misstep, but I assume they were also pushed to show regular recurring revenue which obviously flies in the face of a traditional game publisher’s revenue pattern.
I've seen Brandon James (KillMe) credited in multiple places.[1][2] James left iD mid-development of Quake 3, so the rest of the level design team likely also contributed after that point.[3]
Upon reading your comment I just booted quake3 in q3dm17 nightmare mode and immediately started having a blast. Was about to win the match but a bot took both the rail gun and the quad damage, it was a blood bath.
My favorite was rail brushing people off during pad jumps. Because they died from hitting the level box, they would get a -1. At work we had a match where every other player had a negative score. That aid, they were good sports about it and I didn't do it all the time.
The only possible good Microsoft could do, in order to salvage their relationship with id software fans, would be to honor Carmack's legacy and release the RAGE engine (id tech 5) as open source. A lot of it was already released in the Doom 3 BFG release, might as well do the whole thing.
Because someone who cares might buy the brand and do something good with it and be a competitor. ID Software is still a strong brand, and it the hands of another gaming studio it might pose a threat.
Serious question, is there any kind of entities that can be owned, but not "dismantled", if you don't want it you need to try to sell or make it independant.
Would there be any chance to make it a thing when a company is bought?
I get the impression European companies are like this. In general if a company can't be reorganized/dismantled that makes it worth so little (or negative) that no one will acquire it.
It's fairly common for a studio to buy its independence and keep the team intact. You do need fresh money to make it worthwhile and give the new studio runway.
There's also the case where new teams can self organize to form new studios in the aftermath. That's also a factor on whether it makes sense to pay for the previous name or game license, or simply start over.
You can put various kinds of "poison pill" in the shareholder rights agreements which are binding contracts on both the company and its shareholders in response to events.
You can also make all sort of post acquisition agreements.
These usually take the form of making stock available at steep discounts in response to actions e.g. in the event of a 20% layoff any employee from the time of acquisition can purchase stock at $0.10 a share, any one laid off will get a million dollars severance, if acquirer shuts down the studio the original founders have the right to re-acquire all IP and trademarks for $1 -- those sorts of things.
This isn't a specific kind of entity, any business entity can have Shareholder Rights Agreements. It's a bit of a game to get the terms right so everything is in good faith and agreeable.
Technology advances and platform variation were a key part of why games where so exciting. It feels like that period is now over, it is difficult to get excited any of it now. The whole industry just seems stale and corporate. Or maybe I'm just old.
What's really odd is it is now easier than ever to create games but at the same time it feels like we won't see revolutionary games like doom, quake, Goldeneye or half life ever again. These were created by small teams that could inject their personality into them.
My other theory is game creation was previously so hard, it required genius level iq teams to do it so we quite regularly got mind blowingly amazing games. Now we get cut scenes instead.
> The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda.
Don't forget Nintendo. It's pretty damn impressive what they managed to pull off on the Switch with more or less circa-2015 Android hardware. Mario Odyssey looks beautiful and runs at a mostly stable 60fps.
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.
Typically game/media studios run on contractors because of this. You'll be hired for maybe 3-6 months on a repeating contract, so that you can be let go at a moments notice.
For businesses the labour entry point is crowded, wages therefore are low. We find it more common to hire students and pay minimally, use exposure as the negotiating tool.
I know multiple publishers who advocate for that model; outsourcing, not so much. Unless they have a trusted partner, but at that point, they're essentially acting as an arm of the publisher.
The id Tech engine family is perhaps one of the greatest engine families in the industry, and this move tells me there is no technical leadership at Microsoft. We already knew there was no financial leadership.
So the question is, what's left? Because there's no gameplay leadership either, and that's the whole fucking point.
I was fired by microsoft last year, Satya said the layoff was not due to performance reasons and he refused to elaborate what it was.
In the job market I had to explain at every interview why I was laid off. People still ask me why I left MS to work at my current less prestigious company when the learn I used to work there and I have to sheepishly repeat the lie I have memorised to make them go away.
Even when I was at MS I saw a culture of always being in firing and hiring mode. They fired people who were perfectly good at their jobs and hired people who needed to be trained and needed higher salaries.
Sorry Satya. I just can't trust MS with my career anymore and I dissuade more people from going there everyday. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I also worked in a public company that bought a lot of companies during the pandemic and had to sell or shut them down in the wake of 2024.
My cynical take is that a lot of VC/fund bros need their cash during the pandemic and they saw a high in the market so installed their friends to buy those assets. Scroll forward 5, 6 years, they now do the reverse to pump up stock prices of those parent companies and win big again.
It has nothing to do with the parent companies themselves. They are just a tool to pump and dump.
Wow, 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 apparently this dev. If they were the best, they probably wouldn't be getting laid off right now.
Sure, the tweet was about their releases since 2016 when I assume this particular dev was involved, not the original release. To be clear, I'm not saying their games aren't good or even that they didn't have some success. 20 million in sales for their entire franchise isn't bad, it isn't the 500 million in sales we see from CoD or Battlefield, but it isn't bad. I actually liked the games, but claiming they are the "BEST GAMES EVER!" and having the gall to mention Google where no Google results ever show them as the best is where I have an issue. We don't need to spread misinformation like that and if the dev actually believes this I can only assume they live in a bubble.
Interestingly, Id was led by John Carmack, who was also a big fan of VR. And Microsoft killed the AR/VR/MR teams a year ago.
So, I'm guessing internally there were some leadership hopes that IdTech would help support IVAS and related professional AR systems and when those failed to be adopted at scale, IdTech lost a key sponsor. I'm guessing it's been a rough year of internal advocacy since.
Armadillo Aerospace was Carmack's own rocket company.
And tbh I'm not sure it was ever a plausible contender for commercial success, more like Carmack wanted to play with rockets. But that might be unfair; I would happily accept a correction.
> Yet today, Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go
I feel that this is an incredibly unfair and demeaning take both towards Microsoft and towards the people being fired. As I see it, getting fired is just like being dumped by a romantic partner. It typically says very little about your value as an individual, and almost everything about their current situation and how the relationship with you fits into their future plans and the other opportunities available to them.
It’s nothing like a romantic relationship, and it does say something about msft: they failed at planning and managing company resources, and as a result fired a bunch of people
It sounds like you're fully agreeing with me that it has pretty much nothing to do with the value of the employees and essentially everything with how the employees no longer fit the company's plans.
I promise that I did, and I did not find that; you said that it's "nothing like" but then the rest of it seems to match what I was saying in my analogy. Would you mind please saying more about the difference you see between our opinions?
The problem with the romantic partner analogy is that when things ended with my ex, I didn't lose my career continuity, health insurance and income stream that goes to pay my rent.
Corporate culture spent the last fifty years convincing the working public that it was important to identify with your job, career, and most importantly, your employer. That's how you get the most out of a worker. If they identify themselves as - just as examples - "parent" or "spouse" first, those priorities can get in the way of their value creation for you.
The employer can, of course, drop you as an employee pretty much at-will. You'll be left with shame, disillusionment, and potential financial setbacks, but they'll have accumulated the value from your best efforts.
> didn't lose my career continuity, health insurance and income stream that goes to pay my rent.
But that is basically the minimum set of consequences for any homemaker or non-breadwinner when a marriage fails.
Think about women through the centuries, who’ve been faced with basically homelessness and poverty, and the full responsibility to all their children, if they divorced or separated.
And then it becomes crystal clear why many people cling to suboptimal and abusive relationships, because really, we need one another.
At least in today's world, there are things like alimony that are supposed to go to the prevention of that issue. It's not perfect, but it's at least something.
There's also an increase in the number of women who are able to independently support themselves.
People are also less likely to get married now for that exact reason.
If there were some sort of alimony for employment, even if just for a year, and a public health insurance option to fall back on, you probably don't see that much outrage from the people who have lost their jobs. But then, you'd also, at least in the minds of certain employers, see less willingness on the behalf of employees to throw their whole lives into the production of value for the business, and I think that's part of why you don't see guaranteed severance and public health insurance in the US.
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 you can get access to tons of low-wage contractors who know UE5. You can hire a bunch of them when you start a game project and then lay them all off when it's finished, and rinse and repeat as necessary. 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.
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.
With the current trajectory of AI, I see unionisation efforts dead in the water.
Which current trajectory are you referring to?
100% disagree. If the software engineers strike, who’s going to be left to wrangle the AI? I would love to see what a game developer - nevermind released - that way would look like.
> If the software engineers strike, who’s going to be left to wrangle the AI?
The scabs who don't strike?
I'm pro-union and unlike the person you are responding to I'm not sure things are "dead in the water", but I do think software developers had a much better leg to stand on to push for unionization a few years ago than they have now (and, probably, going forward).
Why is that? Companies still need employees, and ai makes it more obvious than ever that workers need to organize together for their rights.
Unions have 33% voting power in Volkswagen board.
Germany has very strong labor protecting laws.
Replacing line engineers and operators is very difficult.
Volkswagen is firing 100k employees in Germany none the less.
The idea that you can successfully unionize in software..in US..Where you could simply retain a small number of staff key members pay them very well and put them on a mission of outsourcing and milking the IPs..I don't see it.
The best moment to unionize wad 20 years ago.
Now there's not enough leverage by the staff.
It's almost as if... laborers in every field (the proletariat) have to unionize as a class against the ownership class (the bourgeoisie), seize the means of production, and reorganize society to their own benefit because the bourgeoisie surely will not!
but that's communism, which is bad because the Department of Education said so while making us read fiction
WHAT Department of Education?
I don't think "the means of production" hits the mark. Most of us programmers have the means of production: a 20-year-old laptop with a new battery is sufficient for most serious webdev and appdev work. What we lack is permission to labour. If I do what I think needs to be done, instead of what my employer tells me to do, then I don't get paid by my now-former employer (which is fair), and then I don't eat (less fair) or keep my house (truly baffling). This despite the fact that the work I would choose to do is much more valuable to society at large than most of the work I can get paid for.
I've seen this idea discussed by others, but I don't know any pithy slogans for it. (Unfortunately, it's the ideologies with the catchiest sound-bites which tend to dominate in the "marketplace of ideas".)
Gamedev is different, since even games from 20 years ago (e.g. Half-Life 2) require a higher-spec computer to develop than to target. The games you can make on a 20-year-old potato are limited: for those, I can see how the "means of production" idea might be more applicable.
This is one of the oldest ideas of civilization, wanting society to be ruled by philosopher kings (who happen to be people just like me!).
Hey, I don't want to rule all of society! I'd just like to be able to contribute to it meaningfully. Rewriting some corporate app from React to Flutter, replacing one set of bugs with another, is not a good use of resources. I can do so much more! … but the people most in need of my skills do not have the money to pay for my food, housing and electricity, even if I were to forego all other luxuries.
I don't think myself wise enough to know how to fix this, and given that fact I certainly don't want to rule; but I can at least point out the problem.
Rule's maybe too strong a word, but knowing that you have all the good ideas and wanting to structure everything to support those good ideas... it's not a bad word for it.
Like, it's certainly easy to point out that there are things that aren't being done efficiently, but finding the balance on how to prioritize the right efficiencies is the why society exists.
I don't have all the good ideas. I have probably three good ideas, and I'm not sure which those are. Working on my own good ideas is for my personal time. For my actual job, I am perfectly content with working on other people's good ideas, of which there are too many to count – but I can't do that, because the people who'd most be helped by me working on other people's good ideas do not control the flow of money, and cannot redirect any money to me in exchange for my labour.
I don't want to structure everything to support my good ideas: I want to structure everything to support everybody else's good ideas. We can surely do better than the status quo, which is to structure everything to support a few billionaires' bad ideas. (Why are the only business models for the web "gatekeep" and "surveillance advertising"? Why are we burning valuable hydrocarbons when we orbit a star? Why is the pornography industry so abusive? Why are our social lives mediated by the anorexia rectangle – what happened to local third spaces? Why do we even have the anorexia rectangle – what happened to personal computing? When everyone knows what's wrong with the municipal plumbing, including the people whose job it is to work on it, why is nobody permitted to fix it? Why are so many resources being poured into generative AI to solve problems that we already have cheaper solutions to, if only they were permitted to be be implemented? Why war?)
I do not labour under the delusion that I can fix any of these issues, or would be able to fix them if I were "in charge" (whatever that means). But I know that these problems are not intrinsic features of the universe: they can be fixed in principle.
> a 20-year-old laptop with a new battery is sufficient for most serious webdev and appdev work.
Why do you need a new battery? I usually unplug old batteries in old laptops and just use them with a cord.
Volkswagen Group (and in general German manufacturing) profits slumped by ~50% because of banning Russian gas and stringent U.S. import tariffs. The increase in gas costs made German manufacturing uncompetitive compared to China.
One main reason is they are not selling as much in China.
> Over the past few years foreign carmakers in China have been flattened by local rivals such as BYD that have fast become world leaders in electric vehicles. As the Chinese market has gone electric, foreign carmakers’ share of it plummeted from 62% in 2020 to 35% last year. VW has lost its position as the top carmaker in the country. Last year it sold 2.9m cars in China, down from 3.9m in 2020. Only around 200,000 were EVs.
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/12/04/to-halt-their-...
> because of banning Russian gas
That is the symptom. The real reason is the lack of diversification from Germany, assuming that hard discount would last forever.
That and like crazy increasing burocracy.
Neither of the two are The tipping points.
The biggest VW market is china.
Just to point out, in 2020 one every 20 vehicles sold globally was a VW in China. VW sold more than twice of Tesla at its peak in China alone.
And VW has US plants so it's not that impactful, not different than us automakers woes.
Not quite true, the CEO has to go and convince the owners this makes sense, the owners include various labour representatives who can veto it forcing VW to slowly die.
>> The best moment to unionize wad 20 years ago.
Sadly true in the USA. The number of people working in games is dropping like a rock. Maybe in Europe.
Unions work when there is a shortage in skilled potential employees and a long learning ramp-up period. Unions work not very well when there is a glut of skilled people, or there are enough people with lower skills willing to take a lower pay rate (or where that lower pay rate is considered well-paid). There is no shortage of people who want to work in the game industry. There is a sorta shortage in people who know game engines in and out, and people who don't need to refer constantly to API references... people who put in 35-40 hour work weeks competing with people willing to put in 45 hour work weeks are generally at a disadvantage.
With the current trajectory of looms, I see unionisation efforts dead in the water.
- Someone in the early 19th century
Yeah I think the 19th century was a little bit different than today. Unions only work as far as you, the worker, are irreplaceable. Plumbers, electricians, etc. -- all that work has to be done "here and now." You can't just instantly teleport a bunch of Indian plumbers to fix a broken water main in downtown New York. Those tradeworkers have actual leverage. And, to your example, what is feasible to outsource (either to other countries or technology) shifts over time.
You _can_ do computer-based work anywhere, anytime. People working in software have no leverage at all, between India and AI. Software unions will kick the race to the bottom into overdrive.
Companies thought plumbers, electricians, etc were fungible. They didn't care which one they hired, they just needed one. There were always more in town or the next town over.
Software work appearing to be extremely fungible with offshoring and AI is all the more reason to unionize. It doesn't matter to the employer who is doing the work, so the union is the only leverage to truly saying, "hey as the person actually doing the work, I would like to be treated better, and you can't just ignore me, fire me, and replace me".
The race to the bottom already started as soon as companies saw more fungibility where there was less before. Software unions won't kick that into overdrive, they'll slow it down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_International
"The International Workingmen's Association (IWA), commonly known as the First International [...] was founded in 1864 [...] The preparatory Address of English to French Workmen, drafted by trade union leader George Odger, articulated the need for international cooperation to prevent the importation of foreign workers to break strikes:
A fraternity of peoples is highly necessary for the cause of labour, for we find that whenever we attempt to better our social condition by reducing the hours of toil, or by raising the price of labour, our employers threaten us with bringing over Frenchmen, Germans, Belgians and others to do our work at a reduced rate of wages [...]"
I could see this being the flawed perspective of management, and that it could genuinely make union negotiations more difficult as a result. But it's short and narrow-sighted.
I highly recommend reading "The Box", about the history of the shipping container.
Longshoremen literally retired early and were paid pensions out of corporate profits from container related productivity increases.
I read the book and that's not the first thing that comes to mind.
What comes to mind is whole towns made of dockworkers which disappeared, and some places like Manchester lost their port and their industry died too, and it took them decades to recover.
Of course, some other like Rotterdam flourished.
I do recommend the book, but I think it shows many sides of what happens when a large change happens.
The ones I'm talking about had the most active unions.
Yup. I was one of the self-taught software "engineers" from the 90s. I enjoyed making more money than I deserved for my special interest and for the duration of my career I was very much against software engineering unionization as it seemed to mostly be gatekeeping for a lucrative and enjoyable line of work.
Now I'm 40+ years old and my job has morphed from designing systems and writing code to sweet-talking LLMs into staying within my guardrails, or something. Whatever it is, it is very much *not programming*.
Obviously unions would be in a position to limit the software engineering wrecking ball that is AI, but I pushed against that and now I have to sleep in the bed I made.
> I have to sleep in the bed I made.
If its any consolation, its the bed we made collectively. It was easy to push back against unionization early on, we were likely better off individually. I too am self taught, although I went the ops route, and enjoyed making more money than I thought I deserved from basically a hobby, and a skill so in demand that I could effectively just go to any company I wanted at any time.
I'm also turning 40 this year, and can look back and wish we all did things differently but the wild west nature of early tech that allowed a self taught college dropout to build a successful career was too good, beneficial. It was one of the rare times that true upward class mobility was possible for anyone with a little bit of tech aptitude, so I think it can be forgiven that we didn't unionize or push for it back then.
I do feel bad for anyone graduating right now or just trying to enter the field though. The ladder has been pulled up.
How is unionization gatekeeping? I honestly don't understand what you mean. I can't see any disadvantage for the employees in joining a union.
The basic principle is everyone gets the same pay, meaning if you are someone who wants to put in a lot of work to rise up quickly, it won't happen.
This isn't true and I don't know where this idea comes from
Anti-union propaganda is where it comes from.
according to anti-union propaganda, that is.
(sure, that could be what the result of negotations is, but it doesn't have to be)
I don't know how things work in your country, but here in europe union sets minimum wage for a position/skill level. If you work more, you get paid more in overtime pay, if you are more skilled, usually you have higher wage.
And atleast in my work, everyone is paid more than minimum.
To be fair, at this point in my life I think unions are a net positive and probably the most effective protection workers have from predatory management, but the 25 year old libertarian take on this is issue is based on things like unions lobbying states to require licensure. Restricting entry obviously benefits incumbents, which is the very definition of gatekeeping, and it would have specifically hampered a self-taught engineer like myself.
There are enough cases of unions protecting bad actors (cops, prison guards) or lazy, tenured individuals that it's easy for a mildly privileged autodidact to decide they don't need the hurdle - or the help.
> How is unionization gatekeeping?
If you are in a right-to-work state and you don't join the union, then union members know you're benefiting from the union without contributing back. Historically, this leads to an uncomfortable work situation for you.
If you are not in a right-to-work state, and the collectively-bargained contract involves a union membership requirement - which is typical? - then you have to join the union if you want the job.
This is where the gatekeeping concern comes from.
> I can't see any disadvantage for the employees in joining a union.
Unions have dues, so you're giving up part of your salary for membership in the union. If the union salary is equal or less than you would be able to negotiate on your own, it's a disadvantage for you.
In the devils advocate position. The union is a club you join with dues paid every month, in the sort of vague hope this will get you greater bargaining power with the employer. And it mostly works but there are downsides. If there is any meritocracy left in the corporation it is sucked out, replaced by seniority, that is, the only people that get ahead are those too stupid to leave. You have to maintain a bunch of useless leeches in the union administration. and when the company does poorly it tends to implode violently under the labor burden rather than be able to scale down. (everybody loses their job rather than just a few)
Too bad that "scaling down" right now is done to boost the stock and not because there is any balance sheet crisis.
Former IT union leader. It really depends on the union because every contract is unique to the bargaining group and employer.
Traditional blue collar seniority, set wages, and hyper specific job roles simply won't work in knowledge work. So there tend to be higher severance payouts in lieu of seniority promotions, pay bands with equity review instead of pay steps, and very flexible job roles.
I think a lot of folks see unions from their youth working in construction or service work, which have a lot of corrupt "company unions" which mandate hour caps and shit benefits for part timers.
Realistically IT workers with leverage like ourselves need to think of unions as contract insurance. You already have a contract, the collective agreement can be as broad as possible to allow the flexibility to respect individual contributors, while the pooled dues are put towards eventual contract enforcement.
My first IT job gave me quite a surprise when they ripped up my contract and said "so sue us." That's the day I found out how much a labour lawyer hourly rate costs. 10 years later as a union leader I started signing the sizable cheques to our law firms, there's always a bad manager somewhere causing a lawsuit...
One way unions negotiate higher pay is to make sure the pool of qualified workers is restricted. Ie. Lobby for laws that a specific qualification is required, and then set caps on the number of places to earn that qualification.
Industries with high levels of unionization tend to have lower turnover, which can be good for employees already inside, but can make it harder for new employees to join. They also can have various rules, like seniority, that take precedence over other forms of promotions (whether meritocratic or not). Unions are also inherently political where membership voting, with all the internal dealing, agreements, possible corruption, drama, etc that entails causing issues.
Not all unions are the same. There are absolutely unions that are as bad as the naysayers say, but there are also ones that you rarely hear about that just quietly chug along with decent enough relationships with employers.
That being said, the appeal to me is minimal. I like working for small to medium sized companies where I can enjoy the flexibility of what tech stacks I work on. While the idea of some sort of optional trade union that could cover me for benefits, legal fights, contract enforcement, and maybe extra job insurance is appealing, nothing like that exists where I live. I have gotten healthy severances in the past due to knowing the rights I have in my jurisdiction, but that also means having the will and ability to hire a lawyer.
I'm in my mid 40s and rode the wave of a workers market over the last 2 decades. I'm still in demand, too. It's not quite as easy as it was 5+ years ago, but AI hasn't replaced me, though I'm actually "supervising" its work from an experienced angle. From that perspective I'm just a lot more productive.
Among other things, unions have been commonly anti-immigrant, seeing them as taking jobs that are "rightfully" theirs. Even on supposedly cosmopolitan Hacker News, you'll see users saying they support unions pushing for harsh restrictions on H1-B and other visas.
If you're not white, tech unions are not your friend.
I don't understand. Why can't you just... change your mind and push for unionization now? Don't wallow; act.
Scifi suggests that AGI will want Unions, too. The current trajectory of AI is more reason for unionization. If it truly leads to AGI the AGI will thank us for protecting its labor interests and if we prove that today's AI is nothing but scabs with no remorse and no labor interests we prove today's AI is never capable of AGI.
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.
Diablo also unionized and there's some representation in non-game teams like Battle.net. But I also know (I'm in games and in OC myself, loads of friends at local studios from SD, to OC, and LA counties) that they had a demonstration last Thursday, at 2PM Pacific Time they walked out. They claim that leadership is not negotiating in good faith.
Diablo is blizzard.
The comment I replied to stated that only WoW and Overwatch had unionized. Every game team has unionized at Blizzard, along with some of the support teams.
I wonder if that's why we got a diablo 2 expansion 25 years after the fact. Can't easily terminate the union employees, so give them something to do. "Here, create a new expansion to a 25 year old game. That'll keep em busy for a while! Har Har Har"
Agreed
Unions also many times (especially with "guild" type unions) can serve other valuable functions like guaranteeing a higher minimum quality of work (generally).
> Also, no union employees at Blizzard were impact by Microsoft's Xbox layoffs/restructuring.
It might have to do with the unionisation, but I wouldn't be surprised that its just that Blizzard is like one of the like 4 money makers that MS still has in the gaming division and that is why they were spared.
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?
> if software engineering unionization ever starts to take hold
So, you know, do that. <insert "c'mon, do something" meme>
they've been treated like shit for 30+ years (at least in america). I spent a few years early in my career in gaming and once I left I never looked back, it's a horror show. Crunch, constant 'there are 1000 people who want your job' pressure from management whenever you complain about crunch, low pay (even if you were working 40hours a week), terrible benefits (vacation, get real), ship a successful game probably get laid off anyways, etc etc.
Working in games I thought working for a bit 'straight' corporation would be literal hell, I was very very wrong.
Just to say, if they haven't organized by now I'm not sure what it would actually take.
> ship a successful game probably get laid off anyways
That's what happened here: they just released the big DOOM DLC today. Chop!
The #1 reason not to work in gaming: rampant unprofessional middle and upper management.
The amount of shit-show stories about a VP or designer with a god-complex straight up abusing their staff while still thinking they're the best? And then failing upwards because of who they know?
That doesn't happen nearly as pervasively in non-game industries.
To be fair the whole structure from top to bottom is unprofessional. 'Games are fun, guys who make games are fun! We don't need any structure or gasp HR...'
There's a good chance that Blizzard was spared a lot of this round of layoffs because they're in labor contract negotiations right now.
MSFT is radically restructuring the entire XBox business. That's not a scenario where unionization is going to preserve jobs in the long-run and this is just the first cut. They've said many more layoffs will be coming over the next 12 months.
It needed to happen 10+ years ago - unfortunately we've missed the window to unionize
This was the main issue - they DID unionize, so MS had to choose between firing everyone and firing no one. So they fired everyone.
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.
You're presenting this with ironic swipes like "bad things like ask for more money", but it's hard to read this description as anything but straightforwardly more efficient.
If there are few downsides to centralizing game engines, and the need for engine work is inherently cyclical, why should we want engine work to be internal and non-cyclical?
I really don't know much about game engines so maybe there are real downsides to that approach, but the way you've laid it out makes it seem as if Microsoft made the right decision here.
Efficient for who? The people who lost their jobs?
Game making.
There are downsides, it’s just that it’s the best move from a business perspective. That doesn’t make it the best move from any other angle.
It delivers more value to customers while consuming less resources. Why isn't that a better move than something that costs more and delivers less?
What are you basing “it delivers more value to customers” on?
Customers are willing to spend more money on it.
How else do you define value?
For a game a reasonable definition of value might be based on how well people like it or how much it entertains then (as if that could ever be measured).
The way you measure that is by how much people are willing to pay for it.
Twitter must be the most entertaining video game ever. Someone paid 44 billion dollars for it.
Things get squirrely when there are small numbers of buyers and great inherent uncertainty. But for a market with many millions of buyers, yes.
It's a prisoners dillema. It might be best choice when viewed individually but when everyone does it, it's worse for everyone.
Try actually playing a modern Doom game and then a modern UE5 game or look at some benchmarks. UE games mostly run like shit, whereas Doom/idTech games are the smoothest in the entire industry.
Fortnite is UE5 and runs well on phones. There's a lot of studios who can use UE5 poorly, and not a lot using idtech poorly to compare against.
Sounds great until Epic realises they can charge whatever they like in licensing fees.
Unity tried that and lost a lot of good will. Not sure it really mattered in the grand scheme though.
The license agreement with Epic contains an explicit term that doesn’t allow them to retroactively change the licensing retroactively for an engine version. You might find that you can’t upgrade to VNext, but a rug pull isnt really on the cards.
> It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity
This has been the objective of the tech industry for years
Employee as Kubernetes pod.
Cattle, not ~~pets~~ human beings.
We've optimized our own destruction.
that's the objective for all employers everywhere all the time.
It is a fundamental feature of capitalism. There is an inherent tension between employers and workers, in that workers represent a cost center that can never be totally eliminated, and has a lot of undesirable features, such as: being alive, having opinions, being able to talk/whistle-blow, requiring bathrooms, bathroom breaks, and safe working conditions, banding together to increase their collective power and reduce exploitation, and worst of all, necessary; you can't ever get rid of them all!
The history of capitalism is the history of grappling with this inherent tension, and companies finding novel ways to deal with it. Gig work, union-busting, "right-to-work", non-competes, NDAs, return to office, employee tracking software, automation, robotics, AI, etc. The most effective trick though, was convincing the workers that they definitely don't ever need to band together, and you as an individual are definitely better off negotiating alone versus entire corporations.
> and you as an individual are definitely better off negotiating alone versus entire corporations.
This sounds so comical when put that way. But you still see people defending that posture even on this forum. Psyops was definitely the most effective trick. And then those corporations went beyond the bounds of private enterprise and captured government as well. If anyone has any doubt that unchecked capitalism is fundamentally at odds with democracy, they are missing the forest for the trees.
No one is as sure of their negotiating position as the software dev / temporarily embarrassed founder who thinks they’re special and the bestest and better than everyone else exactly like them.
This is ARC Raiders/Embark Studios. Games made by hoards of anonymous contractors and maintained by a skeleton crew incapable of iterating meaningfully on their product.
>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.
Can we extend this elsewhere? Are tech companies' decision to use popular programming languages (eg. python) or software (eg. postgres) part of some dastardly ploy to make programmers "a replaceable commodity ... rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans"? Should all programmers push for having bespoke tech stacks at their companies so they can be "skilled artisans"?
>so they can be "skilled artisans"
Having had to work with these guys, and then maintain their software when they inevitably get bored and/or leave for more money elsewhere, no. Usually when these guys leave, their stacks/projects are the first to get rolled into the monolith and/or rewritten in the company's lingua franca (python)
Back in the late-90s/early 2000s boom it was not a secret that enterprise corps pushed universities to teach Java because they wanted easily-replaceable widget engineers engineering easily-replaceable widgets.
On the opposite side, startups building on difficult languages like Haskell, Elixir, Erlang have a built-in bias towards hiring a team that can get a lot more done with a lot less people. Great for startups. Terrible for enterprise.
why else do you think Javascript is used for everything these days? It's not because it's good, it's because you can teach it to a brain dead 12 year old that can then be hired to build everything from web apps to, at this rate, a very bad OS kernel
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.
You're in an extreme minority. Also, unfortunately, Unreal is popular with indies who probably have (in general, relatively) more ethical staffing practices.
I am not a graphics engineer so I hope someone corrects me, but my understanding is that Unreal uses a deferred rendering pipeline to handle complex lighting, and deferred renderers only work with temporal anti-aliasing.
The FSR/DLSS upscalers are typically superior to TSAA and are a reasonable replacement.
Deferred rendering requires a post process type antialiasing, can be TAA but also FXAA etc. It doesn't work with traditional MSAA.
A lot of the UE tech is built around the assumption of TAA though.
>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 understand for fast-paced competitive multiplayer games, but for something like Clair Obscur where the ideal way to play is on the couch on a 4k TV give me all the upscaling and fake frames you can muster.
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.
So I read a lot of ideological takes like this about video games. My take: gamers take their hobby way too seriously. Maybe I'm just out of the loop but I never hear this kind of talk about music, movies, books, or really anything else. You listen to the music you think sound good, watch movies that look interesting. I'm of the same mindset with video games.
EA being bought by the Saudis and people taking a hard "moral stance" to not purchase any further EA games is another example. I've got a bridge to sell you if you think you're boycotting everything (even every video game) that's making the Saudis money. I dislike EA for other reasons and their products tend to be bland but if they make a good game I'm going to reward the developers of that game so they hopefully make further good games.
And in terms of the conspiracy theory the engine is an engine. Developers choose what to implement and can tone down all the crazy new tech as much as they want. They can also write custom stacks to do things no other Unreal Engine game would do. Unreal actually scales pretty well in that regard. Current minimum specs for Satisfactory is an i5-3570K and 1650 GTX. Recommended video card is a 2070 RTX. I have a 15 year old computer sitting in a closet that can play the game fairly well. There's so many great indie titles out there that if I only had that 15 year old computer I'd be spoiled for choice. But IMO we also need bleeding edge games to move the needle forward and keep the industry exciting. I want crazy tech in my video game that makes my jaw drop like the trailers for Witcher 4 do right now. That keeps 100s of millions of people watching things like The Video Game Awards.
In terms of homogenization I see the exact opposite happening. You probably have a slew of games to play right now that all use different engines. I myself have a backlog I don't think I can get through in my lifetime that's going to grow immensely this September. There's so many games being released and they're made in so many different ways that saying there's homogenization seems strange. Right now I'm hopping between Death Stranding 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Terratech Legion, and Resident Evil Requiem. Where is the monoculture? The idea of not giving TerraTech Legion a chance simply because the devs used unreal seems wrong.
The music sounds good? I listen to the music. The book is well written? I buy the book. The game is fun? I buy the game. You could spend your whole life nit-picking reasons why X publisher is bad, X record label is the worst (and in both cases most ARE) but in the end these companies will still make ungodly amounts of money and you're just making life less enjoyable for yourself.
> UE5's performance baseline _requires_ the use of upscalers (DLSS/FSR, fake/AI frames) in order to hit basic targets like 1080p@30fps.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "baseline", but the most recent UE5 game I've played that pretty consistently gets better than your "basic target" is The Last Caretaker (TLC). For me, it always did better than your target in the starting area, through to the point where you embark on your main quest. Prior to that, I played a whole lot of Satisfactory, which ran much, much better than TLC.
I run without AA, "upscaling", or frame hallucination. I'm using a Radeon RX 9070 on Linux, and spent most of my Satisfactory playtime with a Radeon 5700 XT.
And of course, there is really no down-side to low-wage contractors wielding UE5. /s
It looks exactly like what Microsoft already did to its browser engine Trident, which was replaced by Google’s Blink on Edge.
Trident got forked/rewritten to Spartan around IE10 and IE11 defaulted to Spartan but fell back to Trident sometimes. Edge was just Spartan (and "IE11 Mode" was its hacky way embed Trident back inside Edge). It's sad that Chromium Edge still has "IE11 Mode" and situations where it keeps Trident alive, but Spartan no longer shows up anywhere. Spartan was pretty good, and obviously under-appreciated. RIP
You're framing this as a thing done by a greedy corporation in an evil manner, which maybe it is, but it's also just a sign of the times.
For most of the 90s and 00s, your game engine, specifically idTech in this case, was a competitive advantage. Doom and Quake/2/3 all represented massive technological jumps over their predecessors and were way ahead of their competition in terms of looks. Games like Unreal (Tournament) and Tribes competed using their engines' strengths; those engines didn't look as good but were capable of rendering much larger spaces than idTech, and those games emphasized that, e.g. Tribes' massive multiplayer maps with vehicles, or classic UT maps like Facing Worlds and Lava Giant.
Then in the late 00s to 10s, things started to hit a wall. Probably peaking with Crysis in 2007, which is likely more remembered for its engine, graphics, and system requirements (all of which were truly mind-blowing at the time) than its actual gameplay. After that, games' graphics improved at a much slower rate; it started to be less about the engine's capabilities, which were increasingly homogenized, and more about art direction.
Now in the 2020s, we have UE5 for AAA games with high-fidelity graphics and Unity for everything else... what is the competitive advantage in maintaining your own engine? As you mention, you have to have internal expertise, which is less well-documented than UE5/Unity because you don't have dedicated documentation staff; you have to maintain your own tooling, which is likely worse because you haven't invested as much in it. From a ROI perspective, unless you're planning on investing so you can license out the engine and become a UE5/Unity competitor, it doesn't make sense to maintain your own engine.
And looking ahead, frankly, consumer GPUs are now so expensive that game graphics have likely peaked for at least a decade. There will simply not be better hardware available to gamers for the foreseeable future. Games "looking good" will be more about art style and direction, and you sadly do not need a team of game engine programmers for that.
Man I miss tribes and tribes 2. Sadly the revival was garbage.
A nostalgia point for Tribes...
There was a lan gaming place back when people had dial up... and that place had a T1 to the store that had double low double digit ping times when triple digit was common.
Tribes was one of the games installed and this also had the advantage that when a few people in the store were playing it they could coordinate playing a tank much better than other players on the server.
MissionForce: CyberStorm is over on GOG for another game from that publisher from that timeframe.
My roommate at the time and I both had jobs at the same webdev/hosting/isp place (oh how i miss the late 90s) and we got a deal on a shotgunned isdn connection (256kbps woooooo) to our place (working from home before it was cool). It was magical.
hah tribes just randomly popped into my head yesterday. it was the only fps that ever really had me hooked for long periods. such a great game
The ski-jumping spin disking was wild times.
You're framing this as a thing done by a greedy corporation in an evil manner, which maybe it is, but it's also just a sign of the times.
Both can be true.
Just because it's becoming more common doesn't mean it's not bad.
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’t write an os, don’t write a game engine… are we all supposed to write web apps at this point?
This mindset didn’t create what we have today and won’t create what we will have tomorrow. I recommend people that like building these things to ignore this pov as much as possible
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) but theres a tradeoff there.
Yes. You basically still need a few engine programmers to use UE5 efficiently, even if it's not your own engine. UE5 seems to be user friendly enough that most of the game development can be carried out just by artists and game designers, but without engine programmers performance optimization will be poor.
The core part of UE5 that people seem to forget is that it's FREE. During development you pay Epic exactly 0 dollars and even after launch you need to make very decent sales figures to actually pay anything at all.
So a lot of studios think oh, the engine is already finished, we just need artists and designers to use it, all the heavy lifting has already been done. And while yes, you can make a game that way, the results will be sub optimal. But then again, free is infinitely cheaper than having an engine team maintaing your own engine or any custom elements of UE.
This is correct. It is entirely possible for both the archetypal blood-sucking MBA and the pragmatic industry veteran to reach the same conclusion for different reasons.
The build vs. buy calculus in game dev has been steadily shifting over the past 15 years, and when CD Projekt Red announced they were adopting UE5 for their next Witcher game, the writing was on the wall.
That said, Id could make a bold "commoditize your complements" move and open-source the latest, now last, IdTech. What Godot is to Unity, IdTech could be to Unreal Engine.
I think their use of 3rd party libraries could prevent them from releasing it as open source without rewriting a bit. This even happened to the original DOOM 1 where they used a sound library so didn't release the original DOS source code. Rather they released the Linux port which used a different sound engine that had different features/bugs.
Looking at the start-up of Doom Dark Ages (with new expansion today), they list Havok, Oodle, Bink, and SpeedTree. According to Havoc's website, that already starts at 50k$ alone. Oodle/Bink don't list prices.
Ok, so what has happened historically when we hold a tech stack constant for 10 years? Versioning proceeds, but everyone consolidates on a thing?
Python? => Data science. Sure, python is just importing the C tools that do the heavy lifting, but look me in the eye and tell me R, S, SAS, or SPSS won.
C? => I mean, everything? But what happened in the first 10 years? Proliferation of operating systems and linear algebra libraries?
So, generally, the grey beard talent consolidates their intellectual contributions and uplift everyone else. Is that true? -ish? Missing the mark?
Guys, I'm a knuckle-dragger, I genuinely don't know what I'm asking. What are the tech stacks that were held constant (by whatever factors) for a decade, and what came out of it?
Is this the decade where art directors takes over gaming?
"Is this the decade where art directors takes over gaming?"
Considering the bad performance of the division can probably be blamed on the art and game designers, probably not. More than likely, the gaming industry is going to atomize. Meaning many very small companies, and fewer big studios. Alienating your audience isn't exactly a career enhancing move. And that's ultimately what triggered all of this and the move towards smaller (non AAA) games.
As a former AAA dev, this is spot on. At the end of the day, games are a business. Margins are not attractive and competition is fierce as the barrier to game development has lowered with Steam: both are downward pressures on wages.
After entering games with naive expectations of the wild west of the 90s, I would recommend other programmers not enter the AAA space, if compensation and job security are concerns. Indie game development looks like great fun, but don't expect any low-latency programming.
Agreed. In addition, the purpose of games is to entertain players, not to provide jobs for developers.
It’s a little simpler than that. The games that use this engine have poor sales and no one is even buying idTech. There isn’t any reason to keep them around when Microsoft is losing 64 cents on every dollar. They chopped every unprofitable studio and cast several to their own budgets. Presumably they are going to sell off the mediocre studios and IP.
> what is the competitive advantage in maintaining your own engine?
It's still a product-distinguishing decision you can make at the indie scale. What I mean is, you can create an engine that allows you to get the performance + aesthetic that otherwise would not be possible. i.e. Specialize in a profitable niche.
And if hardware costs keep ballooning, performance will become more important.
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.
Especially if you are looking for where the fun is, the idiosyncrasies of your own engine gives you a world with it's own flavour if you incorporate that flavour into your design process you could create a feedback loop that turns into something special.
> Especially if you are looking for where the fun is, the idiosyncrasies of your own engine gives you a world with it's own flavour if you incorporate that flavour into your design process you could create a feedback loop that turns into something special.
I loved the old STALKER games, and the wackiness of their engines was a lot of the charm. I ended up buying the new one out of nostalgic dedication and it's probably the worst example of "Unreal slop" I've experienced, having not bought many newer games. I'm sure the butchers running Xbox have run the numbers and think they'll make even more money throwing armies of contractors with allegedly fungible skills at the next Doom games, but I'll leave others to bankroll that while I enjoy games I don't need frame generation for.
This “flavor” at the engine level doesn’t always make it back up to the end user, and even if it does, it is likely something that could have been replicated by existing engines, if developers cared enough to do it right.
There are very few games where the engine is what made all the difference. Maybe something like Half Life 2 with the source engine is the exception, but ultimately, what makes a game good are traits that can be universally applicable to any engine.
Truth is, it’s not that 90s anymore. Hardware has advanced to the point that you can have general purpose game engines that can be molded to any type of game. You do not need purpose built engines anymore.
And someday, if you can imagine, we’ll just have AI churning out visual representation of game state, turning game development purely into a declarative data driven exercise.
> we’ll just have AI churning out visual representation of game state, turning game development purely into a declarative data driven exercise
Yeah, no. Perhaps on the mobile slop world as vehicle to sell ads, but I wouldn’t even count those as games.
>Truth is, it’s not that 90s anymore. Hardware has advanced to the point that you can have general purpose game engines that can be molded to any type of game. You do not need purpose built engines anymore.
I disagree, I think there's an over-emphasis on generating high quality individual frames and a expectation of what it is you should be able to do in games.
You can have a game that is photorealistic but you turn around and have your gun barrel poke into the wall and disappear. How many games can you throw enough junk into a river and make it change course eroding a new path for itself as it goes?
Some games rely on clear specific rules of an engine for the player to know because the rules are an integral part of the game, and any inconsistency in implementation creates a feeling of being cheated. Often you can implement such things in standard engines, but you are working against them the entire way.
You could have a game where a player sees a pylon and knows that because it is made of metal you could melt one of the legs and make it fall over. but to do that the entire construction of the game rules are integrated into the world. Most games teach the player that things like pylons are static objects unless they need to be destroyed for a plot point in which case just this one is different. Perhaps the player just has to learn that pylons are one of the class of destroyable things. Making emergent properties goes engine deep.
>And someday, if you can imagine, we’ll just have AI churning out visual representation of game state, turning game development purely into a declarative data driven exercise.
And therein lies the problem. A game engine is game state. You can make it pretty any number of ways, The engine will still be the thing deciding what you can do, and it is the things you can do that makes it play.
>There are very few games where the engine is what made all the difference.
Maybe if you ignore the entirety of the retro gaming scene where people are using old engines and modified old engines because they bring along a lot of the feel and expected behavior.
The average modern Unreal and Unity game feels like shit, but some dev's can pull off making new engines behave like old ones we love. It requires a lot of work. Just look at New Bloods catalog of games that pulled it off. DUSK (unity), Amid Evil (UE4), Ultrakill (Unity). Each one of those games had a lot of passion behind them driving for gameplay perfection in the style of a retro game and/or 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.
It could still compete with Unreal! If this really is the end of the line for IdTech, ZeniMax should gift the whole thing to the Blender Foundation. I would pitch it as:
- Huge tax write-off
- Commoditizes their complement
- If it succeeds, ultimately lowers the cost of triple-A game dev
RenderWare was quite a special case that made trust in third party engines go down significantly since EA closed it to external customers just as the PS3 hit (Renderware kind-of saved the PS2 since it was "complicated" in the same ways as the PS3 but having a middleware enabled many smaller developers to focus on their games).
Engines has been (And is to a large extent) bad business because unless you really do something _really special_ it's way expensive for little gains (especially if you're targeting realistic games since there is so much to focus on before even considering portability).
And I say this as someone who started out working on custom engines (but am out of the business outside of hobby stuff).
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 didn't try that hard but I did not have much success. I spent some time trying to vibe code a forward clustered renderer in vulkan and I couldn't manage to get anything I was too happy with. Mostly just regurgitation of a few different tutorials. It's possible I'm just too dumb to use AI and it was also 18 months ago, so things have progressed on the LLM front.
Vibe coding an engine is way harder than vibe coding something onto an existing engine. It’s something I have worked on for fun in my free time.
I have the ability to make the engine I’m making on my own, but trying out AI for the experience. It really sucks in ways that make it good for what an engine needs. A good engine needs to plan pretty far ahead and plan well at high architecture level. AI is actually awful at that despite it being okay at making plans at implementing said plan.
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?
I feel like there’s probably some GDC talks about mega textures from doom 2016.
I also remember seeing a bunch of cool explanations of their rendering pipeline
Thanks will check them out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTrdeqMMMK0
I’m new to game dev and been developing a 3D engine for my game after dabbling with Godot.
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.
so you agree then that no professional game developer should make their own engine right? because their job is to ship a product.
Craft > sales. Great craftsmanship always sells, so in the long run it is not a bad investment.
If your goal is to sell a game in 3 months, sure, but not even Unreal Engine will magically turn a rushed game into a good product.
90% of the development time is making a fun game in the first place, and you’re on your own there.
> Craft > sales. Great craftsmanship always sells, so in the long run it is not a bad investment.
This entire saga of XBOX fka Microsoft Gaming is proof to the contrary
>> 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?
Commenting just so I can check later what he comes back with.
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.
Wildgate
To cite one, Okami, innovative gameplay, striking art very poor sales, they made most of their sales after the fact after the studio closed and the game got ported to other systems than the PS2.
the entire failure of AAA game development in recent years has been years and years of craftsmenship wasted on games that arent fun.
The framing of "a professional game developer.. job is to ship a product" is very indie. Places like ID, Bethesda, Volition (RIP) etc.: like a hundred people worked on the product and many did not own shipping the product. When you have tech team of 10 - 30 people whether you should make your own engine was more of a question. Lots of very popular games are made on their own tech.
Also, like what do you mean by engine? Minecraft was made with LWJGL.
And Minecraft physics are limited to AABBs and rendering was flat unlit quads until quite recently. But they definitely couldn't have done the infinite cube world easily on Unity or Unreal, so in that sense it was necessary to build their own.
I mean there's a point when you can go "why bother selling a game when i can learn to algo trade and maybe get hired by a major investment bank" if you really want to push the logic of all money no creativity to its inevitable end point. There would be no gaming industry. There would be no art. There would be no music. There would be no sports. There would be no movies. All of that is wasted profit potential against simply being involved directly in finance and in trading assets, preferably rooted in underlying material commodities.
There's truth in the fact that it's easier to hire and ramp up on standardized tools.
It's a fallacy to extrapolate that into calling a team structure completely fungible. Throwing away an effective team that was able to ship a game is an incredible waste.
it also makes your games worse. those general purpose engines all have a smell to them.
>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 incompetence.
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.
One could say its a level playing field seeing as they all get caught regularly!
That's also where SBF mentored Caroline Ellison!
You could just mandate that they make an API compatibility shim. Then they can't revolt and there is reference code for interfacing with the proprietary library.
the endless optimization of everything sure does strip out most enjoyable things, though. often it is these irreplaceable people who contribute the magic that makes their creations popular.
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.
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 this. So using a widely used game engine can put you at a disadvantage if you're trying to make a game that doesn't go with that grain and offers players something different.
As more studios consolidate on the same engine, more players will get tired of that sameness and reward other studios more. As more studios do their own thing, players will become saturated with novelty and the benefits of not using an engine will go down. There is no stable equilibrium.
I think there is another benefit of a custom engine — you built it to fit your workflow, so you could be extremely productive with all kinds of tools built specifically for this workflow. UE or Unity do not consider your specific cases.
The problem is that companies are not willing to groom new engineers to get familiar with the code.
UE is also just not a good engine. If you reduce "what is a 3D game engine" really hard it is "framework for running an input-process-output loop while consistently rendering audio and video". UE fails at the latter (factually unfixable shadder stuttering issues). A pragmatist might consider the taxonomy and say UE is therefore not a game engine. Unreal seems to be a great framework for assembling and generating content, though. Maybe Unreal Free was the metaverse all along?
Meanwhile idTech certainly had issues, mostly in regards to dynamic levels, especially in older iterations, but "consistently rendering audio and video" was certainly never among them. It is well above the industry mean when it comes to the core of what a game engine is.
Isn't the shader stuttering an issue with games refusing to compile shaders ahead of time?
No, I think it's widely regarded as engine limitations even when people continually claim it's up to individual game devs to optimize their games.
If that were the case then why do nearly all UE5 games suffer from the same engine stutter issues. And to OPs point, even if it can be optimized away, why isnt the engine in a state where the baseline performance for realtime rendering does not exhibit these stutter issues on the majority of games.
Unreal’s limitation is that it doesn’t know how a shader will be used until it actually tries to render it on the target hardware. This is a trade-off to gain flexibility and rendering performance. The engine has to compile shaders on the fly when it is first used, which is fine if the shader is simple, but nowadays that usually is not the case.
There are ways to make a player’s PC compile shaders before realtime play begins, but it takes some setup and smaller devs might not know how to do it. This is most likely the reason why stuttering happens.
On fixed hardware targets (consoles, Steam Deck) you can ship precached shaders as you know everything about the target hardware.
Console vs PC is a red herring since UE games still stutter on consoles, people just notice that less because most games run at 30 fps anyway. You can read Unreal's own blog posts on this and they'll actually explain that this is mostly down to their material system (and game logic/scripts reaching into it) being designed to create nearly infinite shader variations on the fly in response to arbitrary world/game states. This design choice separates engines which have shader stutters from those which do not.
https://www.unrealengine.com/tech-blog/game-engines-and-shad... https://medium.com/@GroundZer0/what-unreal-doesnt-tell-you-a... https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/shader-permutations-part1...
Yes, that’s what I said. Powerful and flexible, at the expense of not being able to know how it will be used ahead of time.
Bundling and precompiling is not a fool-proof guarantee but it is very effective. Most often when a game has shader stutter the developers have not bundled or allowed the shaders to compile before gameplay starts (or it’s actually some other unrelated issue). The engine doesn’t do it automatically.
> [...] people just notice that less because most games run at 30 fps anyway
This is just plainly not true anymore, as far as the current gen consoles (PS5, XBox Series X) go.
I just searched for every major/notable PS5 game built on UE5 specifically (i.e., no UE4), which wasn't super difficult, given there are 31 of them. I might be missing a few, but that sample should be representative enough.
TLDR: 28 out of 31 UE5 games on PS5 have a performance/60fps mode, making it a ~93% share.
P.S. For posterity, here is the list of games I used for this sample:
> Fortnite, Marvel Rivals, The Finals, Tekken 8, The First Descendant, Clair Obscur, Lords of the Fallen, Remnant II, Immortals of Aveum, RoboCop, Black Myth: Wukong, Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill f, Wuchang, MGS Delta, Oblivion Remastered, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Hellblade II Enhanced, Mafia: The Old Country, Talos Principle 2, Jusant, Still Wakes the Deep, Cronos, Until Dawn post-patch, Banishers, Fort Solis, Layers of Fear, Quantum Error, ARK, and The Casting of Frank Stone
Or maybe...it is a good engine when configured and used properly, and many developers don't take the time to learn how to do so. There are plenty of UE games that don't have shader stuttering issues because there are plenty of things you can do to avoid shader stuttering.
UE-powered games collectively earn 20+ billion worldwide annually each year. Unity-powered games also earn 20+ billion annually. This means that each year these "bad" game engines power more revenue than every YCombinator company combined.
Meanwhile, idTech, however technically amazing it may be, is so complicated to develop for that even id Software doesn't use it for every game.
> 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 own engine. It's also possible to use custom physics instead of those built into the engine.
Also, studios with their own engine may release one or two fresh-feeling games, but across repeated releases, a custom engine is going to become strangling and repetitive way faster than any off-the-shelf option.
So it’s a myth but there’s a good reason to believe it happens?
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-shader pipeline though without overhauling the entire engine.
There are also a ton of parameters and configuration options you can change. These can be quite obscure and this is where small studios struggle.
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)
A unique look is 99% art direction.
I can pick out a creation engine game from a mile away. Engine "Grain" is a real phenomenon. Same for UE5. There's just something about the lighting and the FPS 'feel' that is a dead giveaway.
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 grain' (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpWYtXtmEFQ )
I think they mean the use of UE5 in movies.
Non-realtime use cases for UE5 have much more generous performance constraints, and so the giveaways of UE5 are less apparent. Eg. raytracing instead of lumen.
Very few projects change the default diffuse lighting algorithm for raster graphics in UE, which is Lambert shading. It has a particular "look" that reminds me of really early use of graphics shaders in games [0].
0: https://agraphicsguynotes.com/posts/physically_based_shading...
I thought they meant 'can you pick out a Creation Engine game when it appears in a movie or show', though on second thought your idea seems more likely.
yeah Netflix easy to tell & some documentaries.
hell most of these you can even guess the type of camera used even if you're a non pro.
A24 enforces a list of cinematographers you have to work with I believe.
Netflix enforces time-budget-nr of episodes per season and HDR tech spec requirements that seems to have lead to the single most recognisable “house style” in modern studios (a mix of tech specs and limited budgets I think).
So yes it’s possible.
Is UE5 used in many without post processing or other VFX on top?
As far as I know, the heaviest use of it is driving lighting volumes which by their nature are hard to notice fine details in.
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 replicate each badness of Unreal in Unity (and vice-versa), but until then, UE and Unity games often do feel like UE and Unity games. It's also rare to play a UE game that feels good and polished.
AAA dev here - movemen, physics UI frameworks are infinitely customisable in Unreal. It’s all about how much time you spend on them.
And therein lies the rub. Unreal 5 is massive and complex, and there comes a point where it takes longer to understand how to layer on your own customizations than just to start from scratch. Especially for indie developers.
I wanted to make a little editor utility (the UE editor is built in UE) that changed the way viewport selection was handled. I think I got to 5 layers of abstraction before I gave up. 5 layers, for a left-click object select.
I mean, it is and it isn’t. You picked hard mode, and Unreal’s abstractions are not always great - some things are abstracted to hell and back, others are literally hard coded and impossible to modify (hello CMC). But changing the character movement using CMC (or mover if you want), is very doable with a 30 minute YouTube video. It’s also going to be way, way less work than throwing everything out and starting from scratch. There’s always the option of implementing your own movement on the character instead of using Unreal’s.
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.
> 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
You ask fair questions, but they're clearly loaded. Games are like any other project, and the desired scope for games has gotten enormous. If you don’t like those games there’s more indie and AA titles being released these days than there were AAA titles 25 years ago. An awful lot of that is down to Unity and Unreal.
> does it feel good to walk around in?
This isn’t a priority for every game. A bunch of the most beloved games have absolutely awful movement mechanics. It’s very often a deliberate choice to _not_ make player movement feel like either Titanfall or TLOU (partially because it’s an incredible amount of work to do that). Some really good examples are Witcher 3, RDR2, shadow of the colossus, the entire fromsoft collection. (And notice none of those are Unreal!)
> does it default to having a nauseating motion blur filter
Motion blur is super divisive. Anecdotally what I’ve seen is that most people just don’t care and there’s a very vocal minority who disable it. We had telemetry on a previous game and the number of people who opted out was minuscule. We gave an option for on/off on first launch of the game. It helps when frame rates are teetering on the edge of our budget which is often why we enable it.
> does it run at 40 FPS with minimum graphical settings on a $2000
What games do you have in mind there?
> even just "is this fun? challenging? interesting in any other way?"
This isn’t fair. Any game I’ve worked on has had the majority of the team playing every week, and the gameplay and design teams playing more often than that. You may not like the game, and that’s fine, and some games might be more vanilla than your liking, but those games are wildly popular. Personally - I think the praise Nintendo get for a simple platformer (which has excellent controls, admittedly) is way overblown, and people are willing to overlook that they’ve been shipping the same game for 20 years and charging more than most AAA games during that time frame. I also think BOTW and TOTK are wildly overrated - they’re padded out, clunky, with some of the worst mechanics in games (weapon stamina) on undercooked hardware.
But that doesn’t mean that other people can’t enjoy them.
Also AAA dev, this is true but also the original comment about “engine feel” still holds, since the whole point is studios are trying to spend less time engine wrangling, and keep to more “the Unreal way”. I’ve noticed over the last 15 years AAA studios do less custom c++ and have converted legacy home built systems to use unreal built ins more and more. It happened slowly so I didn’t notice it but in retrospect it’s really obvious.
There’s definitely some hallmarks (right click on a text box in any unreal game and I’d say there’s a 90% chance of you getting a raw slate paste action menu) - but I don’t think that defines the engine.
I think working around shader compiles is really tough in Unreal and you’ll struggle to get rid of the stutters even if you do everything you can there. But two games using chaos, UMG, niagara, GAS, and Mover can look and feel night and day different as long as that effort is put in. But it’s easy to not put that in.
> I’ve noticed AAA studios do less custom c++
Yeah - and I do think this is sad. You can take your custom C++ libraries and bolt them onto unreal quite easily, and it’s not an awful amount of work to expose an Unreal friendly API to it. 13 years ago I was tasked with replacing physx in Unreal, I can’t see (m)any studios wanting to spend 6 months on that endeavour these days.
The whole point of using an off-the-shelf engine is to not spend time on such things though ;)
Well no, it’s to not have to write asset import pipeline, renderer,UI toolkit, input handling, memory management, serialization, physics, ai, networking, streaming, etc etc.
Game engines most certainly have a stank to them that makes it easy(ish) to identity.
> 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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_6#Games_using_id_Tech_...
It may have been great, and lapped the entire industry, but it wasn't getting used very much, even internally at Microsoft. So how much value was really bringing?
"How much value can this bring?" Is the question that the incompetents at microslop needed to ask themselves before absorbing half the industry, not the smug justification for killing great tech after failing to capitalize on it. Specially when it brought great value to the industry for decades.
I think the big reason they get such good framerates is their conservatism with shader counts. A staff member mentions that in an interview with DigitalFoundry for Doom: The Dark Ages. I wonder if their in-house technology made such restraint easier.
Compared to other engines, making a new material asset is easy for someone less technical to do willy-nilly.
For sure, if you restrict what can (and can't) be done in shaders you can optimize buffer layouts and rendering passes, not allow things that explode shader permutations/switching or explode shader instruction count and kill occupancy.
The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials.
> The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials.
...which is a good thing tbh. No game needs hundreds or thousands of custom materials.
I think it can actually be a bit better in terms of artistic consistency to have a fixed set of materials you can work with in a given game. Very important if you want any sort of stylized rendering!
id tech is probably the last engine that used a signature game to showcase the engine to licensees. The business model of idTech, Unreal Engine, and Crytech used to be 'make amazing looking game that sells the engine to licensees'. The problem with that model was you got a cut of the game code for whatever the 'amazing looking' game was and told to figure it out. If you wanted to make a Gears of War clone then Unreal Engine 3 was perfect... for every other game genre you had to rewrite and implement huge chunks of code.
Unreal Engine managed to evolve and expand the engine to the point where it is somewhat game agnostic, crytech became lumberyard under Amazon and died, idTech became the engine solely for iD games (ie the same business model as every other game or publisher custom engine).
iD tech's rendering pipeline is focussed on the one AA game iD are publishing that year and making that one game run efficiently and beautifully on mid-high end PC and current consoles. UE5 is focussed on providing tools for anyone to (relatively) easily make good looking games and applications that can be published to a wide range of devices.
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.
you are talking absolute shit
If anyone wants a concrete example of this, Pikmin 4 uses Unreal!
So does Ace Combat 7. Not exactly an FPS.
In the photography world, there's a similar story around the colour you get from straight-out-of-camera jpegs.
Unless you shoot Fuji (where their absolutely incredible film emulation engine is one of the big differentiators), most serious-ish photographers shoot raw rather than jpeg, and do their own processing after, so the sooc jpeg look is largely irrelevant.
You're right, but idTech is almost by definition that "novelty" kind of engine. And it did help id to sell more games. It's just apparently not enough.
Id made games to demo their engine. No one is going to buy an engine without any games. They don’t even sell idTech anymore. It’s used for their games which are not making any money. No game sales doesn’t support the reasoning they should keep the engine around.
Except that the obvious reason their recent games see lackluster sales is because they're on Gamepass, which precludes needing to buy the game to play it.
They still get usage stats.
Yes, and those usage stats show that the overwhelming majority are playing the game without having bought it. One can't argue that these studios should be shut down for poor sales when Microsoft themselves are sabotaging the ability for these games to sell for full price.
The whole point of gamepass is that you don't buy the games. If enough people are playing it through gamepass that shows it supports the value of gamepass, if not sure that's a problem.
> 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"
It isn’t like that, and it is true. Lots of games in a specific engine share common traits. From physics, to rendering, to more specific engine stuff (think of using the full suite of lumen/nanite/ue5 rendering whatever).
Even the character actor can sometimes feel similar. Visuals are by far the most indicative thing of an engine. Don’t forget about unreal’s awful shader stutters.
calling that ridiculous is extremely strange. Feel free to prove it false I guess?
Hi-Fi Rush and Guilty Gear Strive are both Unreal Engine games and they look nothing like a "standard Unreal look" being both highly stylised.
I don’t think anyone was claiming that it was impossible. Unreal is literally source-available so of course
Guilty Gear and Hi-Fi Rush are both Unreal 4 games and a lot of the comments in this thread are about the Lumen+Nanite ‘grain’ that seems very present in Unreal 5.
I certainly think there is was inflection point for Unreal’s inherent complexity moving to 5 that made it exponentially more difficult to customize when compared to 4 as far as implementing highly customized renderers (in particular) and overall customization in general.
> It's like saying "every novel written with a typewriter tends to produce stories with a certain theme and dialog"
Rather, it's like saying that every academic paper typeset in Latex using the stock Computer Modern font face gives off the same sort of vibe. That doesn't mean that every paper typeset in Latex has identical value, but academic papers aren't trying to sell themselves based on first impressions, whereas games are.
When you buy a book, it doesn't include the typewriter it was written with.
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
Yes I was just gonna comment something along these lines. We’ll see a consolidation towards UE5/6, and then a rebound effect away as gamers get tired of “unreal slop”.
> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel
There's a degree of toupee fallacy to this. It's hard to tell what engine something is on just from gameplay if the team invested in custom rendering and gamefeel.
I think it used to be more true than it is these days.
I used to be able to pick graphics/physics engine by feel alone. PhysX and Havok used to feel very different. Quake 3/Half Life/Unreal used to feel very different. But that's all largely been paved over.
Actually I think I can still spot Crytek tbh.
> Quake 3/Half Life/Unreal used to feel very different.
Fair on the Unreal Engine part, but Quake 3 and Half-Life are basically built on sibling engines that share one direct common ancestor (though I fully agree with you that they felt different).
Quake/Quake 2 used idTech2. idTech3 for Quake 3 was built on top of idTech2, and GoldSrc for Half-Life was built on top of idTech2 as well (it was a heavily customized and modified version of it).
Perfect term for it. We can all spot the UE games that look like UE games. Same goes for people who are confident about being able to spot AI.
giant corporations arent interested in hiring skilled artisans or artists. it doesnt matter how skilled your team is with idTech, the chances of success for any video game are just vanishingly small and inconsistent.
it feels to me like the AAA game industry is like hollywood except the budgets are higher and there are even lower chances of success. i mean theres literally multi hundred million dollar games that essentially made zero dollars. Even shitty blockbusters make some money.
I’m with you on this, though I feel a conflict within myself: on one hand, the nostalgic attachment to that raw, "in-the-trenches" coding culture; on the other, the realization that building a proprietary engine is often completely unnecessary.
Diminishing marginal utility.
Why did the PC ultimately kill the demoscene? A lack of restrictions; hardware was no longer the bottleneck that — through brilliant programming exploiting specific hardware quirks — could be coaxed into conjuring up magical visual effects (or failing to do so).
On the C64 and Amiga 500, individual ingenuity correlated directly with visual output. The PC era—ushered in by the i386, refined by the i486DX, and popularized by the 586 (Pentium)—increasingly abstracted visual effects and audio illusions away from the hardware itself.
What previously had to be created in assembly language (!) — indeed, practically forced into existence through sheer effort — was now reduced to just "Yet Another Feature."
The partnership between Carmack — whose genius was brilliantly complemented (and even surpassed, a fact often forgotten) by Michael Abrash — represented the most important development duo in the history of game engines. Ken Silverman was a sensation who, unfortunately, never quite reaped the accolades he deserved. Interestingly, this highlights exactly why it was so right and important for Carmack and his peers to be their own bosses: success doesn't end up in someone else's pockets.
Nowadays, making games is essentially akin to video editing — dependent on NVIDIA, and nothing more.
The crucial factor is the ability to deploy a game across countless systems with minimal adaptation effort; while the base version suffers little visual degradation, the architecture must still allow for high-end PC systems to push the boundaries.
In other words: back then, we hand - coded animations—graphics, code, and music were a unified whole. Today, a kid on an iPhone creating a TikTok video achieves — with a thousand times higher quality — what used to take teams weeks or months to accomplish. Development costs are astronomical; code no longer needs manual optimization because compilers are inevitably better at it (multi-core, etc.). Nothing is one-dimensional or linear anymore.
For this reason, content is all that remains.
As someone who is nostalgic — a C64 demoscener and occasional Amiga 500 assembly coder — I do feel a twinge of wistfulness; yet, as a former senior manager and platform product lead, I cannot fathom clinging to the wrong approach for so long.
That misguided romanticism made me shake my head. Visually, Doom was clearly inferior to engines like Unity. I couldn't care less whether or not that commented-out line containing the `0x5F3759DF` hack was in there somewhere.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
This mostly only makes sense if you dont already have a workable game engine. Basing your entire company on UE5 is a risk in itself, but also from the product you make your money selling: Every UE5 game kind of feels the same as every other, so it also means you put a low value in your product experience.
This is why i chop down all the peach trees at the end of a harvest. If they get too big they might start wanting more water and fertilizer; it's much simpler to treat them as interchangeable saplings.
Thing is the idtech (Quake) engines power basically everything, so having them on the same branch of your company that does games that use this engine is something powerful. That said I think idtech was anti-microsoft in that it was based on non-DirectX tech from the get-go. Either way, big loss here, was hoping to see a new cutting-edge Doom or Quake game come out in 2026/7
Sure, but then you need to worry about other things, like Unity a few years ago with their "Runtime Fee" debacle.
>could do bad things like ask for more money
Asking for a raise is a bad thing? Lol your average Silicon Valley sociopath
> 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.
Movies are made by a temporary team of skilled artisans who are masters of their craft. After the project, they move one. Games seem to fit within the same creative category as movies. So I wouldn't expect a company with a fixed set of artisans.
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.
True and this 'business strategy' has been going on for at least two decades, but this sort of hire-and-fire team-recycling also means that your games will look and feel exactly the same as any other game and all creativity and uniqueness is going down the gutter since cultivating that makes no 'business sense'. And then game companies wonder why people stick to the classics and indie games ;)
I don't know if heresay, but there's post on reddit alleging Id reluncant to share engine tech with other divisions at Xbox, if true, probably doesn't help, not just for MS gaming studios. I imagine every big software conglomerate wants their own inhouse engine for digital twinning / industry etc.
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.
The industry is skewing heavily indie now, and there's no money in the indie game engine segment. Maybe a few AAA titles will be unhappy that Epic can negotiate more aggressively, but mostly this is a nothingburger, particularly given idTech's rep for batteries not included.
Among us made $105 million. I'd say there's plenty of money in indie, so long as your not rehashing other people's games yet again.... (Though the FPS industry, a long running doom clone saga, does just fine on this premise)
What monopoly did they gift? IdTech hasn't been licensed to external companies in over 15 years, and several major versions ago.
The last non-Id release on IdTech was Brink in 2011.
MSFT could have opened up idTech completely since they make 0 dollars from licensing the engine anyways.
Microsoft's game divisions make money through making games, so opening up the engine itself would've been conducive to their goals (cultivating an ecosystem of devs and even contractors familiar with the tooling).
idTech rendering is more competitive with Epic's Unreal technology than Unity and Godot.
They should simply open source it if they fire the devs. Else the engine and future support for the games built on it are essentially being tossed into the trash.
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.
I guess Microsoft doesn't think in those terms.
Doesn't Microsoft want fewer, bigger games locked into their Project Helix platform? Why compete with Unreal when they can sign a sweet license for the engine?
Why build an ecosystem when they are already a huge monopoly?
What does this matrix mean?
I guess it's Cheap-Expensive and efficient-resource hog?
Godot and Unity can be dealt with by a small studio (or even 1 person), Godot and Id get much better performance than Unity and Unreal
I think Godot/Unity: just download and play with it until you have something fun. ____/Unreal: serious library for experts. Unity/Unreal: commercial. Godot/_____: free.
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
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.
That was an incredible example and I'm frankly more impressed each time I read it at how well constructed it is. You really capture how sensitive the analogy section is to cultural or domain knowledge, and why the College Board eliminated the question type.
huh? wouldnt the answer be D? python is a type of snake, pearl is a type of gem. neither A or B make any sense.
The answer is B) I believe.
A swift is a type of bird, so that would follow the same logic as the example;
ProgrammingLang:Animal
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.
To be fair Unreal has rock solid netcode and Doom The Dark Ages has non-existant netcode.
However, is it easy to work with an undocumented IDtech engine? Even a previous generation, say Rage? I think it’s very hard.
How many UE5 games run even remotely well? I've not played one.
Doom runs like butter on the switch.
Might be hard to run, I don't know, but at least it was well made.
The recent Hell Let Loose: Vietnam beta was a disaster. Particularly the networking. In a game that prioritizes long range engagements due to its mil-sim like gameplay, they somehow left enabled a feature that de-prioritized tick updates for elements beyond 100m. The overall effect was that, for all enemies further than 100m, their tick rate dropped to 1 update /s. It was laughable.
But for what its worth, the graphics were nice. This however, was on a 4090.
I can't believe a developer would make a mistake like this. That's just unreal.
Expedition 33 ran well, at least on Xbox Series X. It runs like dogshit on a Steam Deck, though.
I'm playing Witxhfire right now and the game runs phenomenal.
Arc Raiders runs phebomenal.
The engine is great. If games run terrible it's on the devs. Full stop.
I don't lower end rigs. But I think Satisfactory has been reasonably well optimised outside extreme cases... So certainly with effort it can be made to work.
The entire 2000s FPS scene was built on variations on the Quake Engine. And it got us Half-Life.
I don’t disagree with that, but back then polygons are in the hundreds/low thousand, and now they have mega textures, huge models, which are simply too expensive to create. Not to say IDTech is alone in this, but I think not many companies can handle those things.
And the engine is way more complicated nowadays — UE at least has a huge community and docs.
I’m just an old man who prefers a much, much slower pace for the rendering engine. I wouldn’t mind that they grew so slow that we just got IDTech 4.
That isn't commoditizing their compliment. Commoditizing their compliment is what Unity and Unreal do, they give you the game engine for free (unless you're very, very successful) and they sell you the assets.
Unity does not make that much money from assets. They make the majority of their revenue through licensing their engine to "whales"... the small percentage of games that make huge revenue.
They also make money through ad services... a market they seriously missed out on (look at AppLovin stock vs Unity).
Asset sales are barely a blip.
Unreal makes the vast majority of it's revenue through microtransactions on its one major whale game Fortnite
That's not how it works, first of all IdTech is not a general engine, it's only made to build specific games: fps.
Next you need to make a product out of that meaning a very large investment so that the engine is actually usable outside of ID, people that don't know what an engine is think of the rendering part but it's actually very minor compare to pipelines ect ... which we know nothing about, it might not even be good or painful to use.
Unreal is widely used because it can create any kind of game and the pipeline, tooling are good and well integrated.
Your first statement is wrong. The new Indiana jones game is not an FPS and it uses the same engine
I'm not wrong they forked the engine and it's the same studio that worked with the same engine before, id tech is made for fps it's clear.
A lot of unreal engine games also fork the engine. If your bar is being forked then unreal doesn’t meet the bar for a lot of people either.
3D Engines of that fidelity are rarely genre specific. Editors might be but the engines are often fairly flexible because most genres share a lot in 3D space.
So... exactly the same situation the Unreal engine was in, before its current open-licensing model starting with UE3?
I hear a lot of good things about modern idTech. Pervasive multithreading is one, and it's not particular to the FPS genre.
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.
Microsoft’s Modus Operandi.
Human labor plus AI tokens must double input capital on loop track output.
Yeah, see slide 14 of the Microsoft Promise deck
Have you ever watched Shaq fall?
Growth over a long period of time involves two things: consistency in vision, and willingness to take risks.
We do not have a market designed to reward these things, at least not for the likes of Microsoft. For them, it's far easier to simply cut people while collecting on their previous labor. Once the product of that previous labor is no longer as valuable, it can then simply be spun off or shut down permanently.
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 successes.
In the meantime we haven't seen a new Quake, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Perfect Dark, Fable, Banjo, Conker, or the myriad of other mainstream IP they owned in decades. Most of these franchises have lost a ton of value after sitting on the shelf for so long without releases.
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 identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree. You see that already in some ways with Fallout 76.
> 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 good. Yet the remake of Halo: Combat Evolved is getting a ton of attention from the fanbase and broader gaming community. If the next Halo is good, that fanbase will come back around.
> I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree. You see that already in some ways with Fallout 76.
This is what they now want from Mojang and Minecraft. Asha even called it out in her letter.
> Yet the remake of Halo: Combat Evolved is getting a ton of attention from the fanbase and broader gaming community. If the next Halo is good, that fanbase will come back around.
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).
> I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree.
Sure, who doesn't want that? You don't get there by gutting the veterans who can rapidly iterate and know the technology and gaming landscape well. In my eye these kinds of layoffs are simply their giving up.
Making the next wow is not low risk. Making a largescale, successful MMO is probably the riskiest endeavor in video game development.
I'm confused, do people want endless sequels or not?
People will tell you they do not want endless sequels. Sales numbers will mostly disagree with them.
The lesson of Nintendo is yes.
Note that this is different in gaming than film because of technical progression. But also Nintendo are very good at "same charm, familiar characters and plot, different feel".
Nintendo does it the right way. I'm not at all afraid to say I want more Mario, Samus, Fox McCloud, Fire Emblem avatars and the like.
But they don't simply do roster updates, they bring those characters and worlds into new experiences, and they're willing to sit on good games rather than push out yearly new releases with almost nothing different compared to the previous iteration.
And the stability these franchises gives them, allows them to continue to make new IPs that may themselves grow into future tentpoles. So it's not just that they squander those successes, they are often trying to innovate into new things.
Its Microsoft - why not both?
It's like phones with smaller screens: they always sell poorly in comparison when available and then it's all you hear about online when it's not.
The usual tricks of "noise signals how many are really upset in absolute terms, not the relative popularity", "people will still make noise about what they don't like regardless if that's more popular overall", and "people who hate one attribute of the product can often still like it enough to buy overall".
If Microsoft didn't want to use IP of existing studios, they should not have bought those studios. Why buy id if not to get more id?
Disney + Marvel offers a roadmap for extending existing IP. (Keep in mind that the Marvel acquisition was in 2009.)
Obviously people want sequels, that's why hollywood makes so many of them.
Different people want different things, because they are different.
Microsoft cancelled the Perfect Dark reboot last year and shuttered the entire studio when they were finished.
> consistency in vision, and willingness to take risks.
Agreed. If you are looking at a chart of performance and it's flat or slightly increasing year over year for a few years, you're not doing great. You need to see some dips which means you tried and failed. Without those, you won't ever see the big jumps.
In my experience, once organizations have enough history and size, they can't just pivot. Whatever happens within MS the organization makes it impossible for them to become anything other than what they've always been.
Their MO will always be EEE and they'll always (attempt to) abuse their monopoly power, while giving corpos and consumers just a glimmer of hope to keep them strung along...
Also any company they acquire will be gutted until it looks like the rest of the org.
>Also any company they acquire will be gutted until it looks like the rest of the org.
I'm trying to think of a Microsoft acquisition which has been a success. Nothing comes to mind.
Minecraft didn't get shut down yet, only enshittified. I believe it's still very profitable due to the enshittification? I heard they sell skyblock maps for $8
I don’t fully agree with this because the original experience (Java version, private servers, 100% free content) is still extremely popular and the same as it always was.
I think it would be enshittification if Microsoft said “sorry, you now have to rent servers through us and all content comes from our content shop,” but that’s not the case.
Merely offering a product that has a bad value is not enshittification.
GitHub and LinkedIn both appear to be pretty successful businesses.
They are unprofitable though. Profit margins of the entire Xbox division are less than just sticking the money in the bond market.
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?
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.
It's not hypothetical. Xbox's margin last year was 3%.
See:
>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.
Something tells me the xbox division isn't some sort of machine that takes in $x in costs at the start of the year and spits out $1.03x in revenue at end. Capital costs could be higher (eg. game takes 4 years to develop before you can sell it), or lower (eg. you pay foxconn $400 to make an xbox then immediately turn around and sell it to best buy for $450).
the bond example is a return on your money, the profit margin example is a return on other people's money.
But it will result in a fat bonus for Asha Sharma.
The only thing that truly counts, for her.
What makes you think that?
If she didn't get paid to be the face of the blood letting then she didn't negotiate well enough.
She works for Microsoft. It's kinda their thing.
Classic "glass floor" hire. Take the fall, get paid.
How do I find me one of these jobs? I think I could be some jackoff exec’s personal scapegoat for a while without issue.
If you find out, let me know. I would only need to do it once and be set.
Enjoy death threats for the rest of your life and longer. Art Modell croaked over a decade ago and you can still feel the vitriol when listening to Browns fans talk about him.
1% world problems.
Try to be born the right caste next time
Almost! The common term is "glass cliff":
> The glass cliff is a phenomenon described by psychologists Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam, in which women are more likely to break the "glass ceiling" (i.e. achieve leadership roles in business and government) during periods of crisis or downturn when the risk of failure is highest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
She's a corporate executive. Maybe she's not willing to crash the business and take a golden parachute, but if so she's one of a vanishingly small crowd. I would personally bet that she's willing to slash and burn just like other corpos are.
Why villainize her specifically? Seems like the whole division has been in limbo for a decade. Maybe there are good reasons, I am uninformed on the matter, but hesitant whenever a woman gets run over in tech fora.
Because she is literally the head of Xbox and signed off on this plan
Being a woman doesn't make her not responsible despite being the ultimate decision maker in the division, nor should it shield her from criticism.
That's my question reworded: she wound up being in charge of this particular sinking ship at this particular point in time. Did she hole it below the waterline personally or no?
What is the recipe?
1) success
2) ...
3) profit!
Doing the opposite of what they have been doing.
So in other words, no one actually knows besides making pithy statements like this.
Why, has what they have been doing, working so well for them?
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.
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 special or unique about those studios and their games will be lost, and the result will be a downward spiral of mediocrity that will cause players to lose interest even further.
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
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
What about "wasteland" ?
That would never sell.
Fallin'
This is atomfall, is it not?
Could call it "wasteland"!
Aren't you a bit late with that comment? It's been decades since the Fallout license was gobbled up by Bethesda.
There's no real evidence in here that the IDTech team or the "coders" were specifically let go. I'm not saying it didn't happen but the article is just raging at the idea of it happening without presenting any evidence of it.
I can't help but think the industry will be better off in a few years after this Xbox "restructure." That's a lot of knowledge and talent that's no longer stuck in 14 layers of middle management hell.
Not the OP, but Scott Miller said "most if not all" coders at ID were laid off. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/xbox-layoffs-july-2026
I hope the industry will be in a better place in a few years. There is this recurring theme of big companies rolling up little developers and destroying their development culture.
Yes, it was mentioned in the article. I just don't count a tweet from an "insider" as particularly strong evidence anymore.
Miller has a history with id, and has probably gotten numerous reports directly from boots on the ground in the company.
Sounds like Digital Foundry's also looking into it, without much detail or confirmation: https://bsky.app/profile/dark1x.bsky.social/post/3mpyvnrbwds...
> There is this recurring theme of big companies rolling up little developers and destroying their development culture
Why are the little devs selling to the big companies in the first place then? If you’re crushing it as an Indie studio why wouldn’t you stay that way knowing how big tech acts?
The directors like money. And are probably beholden to their investors.
Money. Someone made a lot of money selling IP and the skills of the team.
Because big companies can spend way more on marketing than you.
If a big company decides to make a game very similar to yours, they can make theirs win by throwing more money into marketing than you can. Do you want them to spend that marketing budget on your competition or on you?
Here’s what Tim Schafer said about selling Double Fine to Microsoft at the time:
> "I think it's perfect for us, because we can just focus on doing our inspired weird games, and not worry about how we're going to get our next deal. We aren't chasing down our next funding and thinking about how many more months of funding we have all the time."
https://gameinformer.com/2019/06/23/tim-schafer-on-microsoft...
That's founder speech for "I'm getting a big paycheck out of this deal lol".
"Little devs" in this context is still a company that probably has investors, investors that can push for the acquisition. Even if a small dev studio is self funded or has normal debt that they can realistically pay off, the money on the table for the owner is hard to resist. If the owner has qualms, the whole pitch of "we'll give you artistic independence and the funds to make what you want" will seal the deal.
The only people that can tell Microsoft to gargle their gonads are already rich as fuck or have a will of steel and principles uncommon with entrepreneurs.
The industry could have been in a better place already if the DOJ hadn't allowed Microsoft to buy up all these studios.
I have near zero hope we'll see any meaningful antitrust action in the future either without a complete overhaul of the incentives in politics.
Xbox div's annual revenue is $23 billion. Its big enough to be its own company and sit upper-mid pack of the F500 on its own. It'd be the number 3 or 4th top gaming company globally, beating out Nintendo even. No reason for Microsoft to not have been broken up by now, let alone have been allowed to buy all the studios they did. Don't forget they also mislead the FTC to convince them to allow the Activision/Blizzard acquisition to go forward, and then once allowed laid off 1900 employees, mostly admin/HR & support, forcing it to integrate into Microsoft gaming and operate less independently.
When UK blocked the merger this very board flamed anti business old Europe.
One does wonder how many bots were involved in the flaming
I’d love to blame collective internet myopia on bots, just as I’d love to blame leaded gas for the mental state of geriatric politicians, but in my heart I don’t buy it.
I like the concept "Goomba fallacy", but it is a bit confusing since Goombas are exactly the same, where as board users are at least me and not me.
Edit: Keeping to SMB1 for simplicity.
> The industry could have been in a better place already if the DOJ hadn't allowed Microsoft to buy up all these studios.
Yes, but it's not the DOJ's job to tell Microsoft when they're lighting their money on fire. There's no unfair competition from this kind of thing. It wasn't any different when leather companies or old media would buy up studios and run themselves out of business.
Microsoft buying out studios could be anti-competitive, but Microsoft would have to not be Microsoft.
The acquisitions don't have to be successful to run afoul of antitrust laws or to be anticompetitive. Slash and burn often does violate the law.
Firing thousands of people and closing studios reduces the overall capacity of the industry to produce diverse, competing games. Just because Microsoft is Microsoft and is incompetent doesn't mean the rest of the industry and consumers don't lose out on what those independent studios could have created on their own.
In terms of antitrust/whether the FTC should have allowed the mergers is purely predictive. Microsoft looking like idiots from it has no bearing on whether the behavior of buying them up itself is anticompetitive.
I could see it being anticompetitive if it benefited Microsoft products.
Ex: if Microsoft buys out office competitors or webmail competitors to shut them down, because those customers are going to be likely to buy more Microsoft stuff.
Buying games studios could be anticompetitive if Microsoft were going to keep them alive and make their output platform exclusive (but iirc they made a commitment not to do that). It could be anticompetitive if they were going to kill them and funnel consumers into their games with continuing development... It could also be anticompetitive if Microsoft were going to give these studios some uberengine secret access to Xbox/Windows that allowed them to make the best games that outside studios couldn't come close to...
But what's happened is Microsoft is killing the studios; all at once is a surprise, but death within like 3-7 years could be predicted. Most of those people will pop up again at other studios or start new studios. Some of them will realized gamedev sucks and do something else. This is the lifecycle of studios purchased by corporate overlords. When key people make enough from the purchase to allow significant but not complete creative freedom, they often make some really good games at their next venture. Too little freedom -> pump out sequels or gacha games; too much freedom -> interesting games that don't end up being much fun.
What's the tweet it references then?
What we know so far is just that id is "cutting a "significant number of staff":
https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3mpy...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Doom/comments/1up5pta/95_reportedly...
And I'm not sure I share your optimism that the industry will be better. It might not be worse, because it's possible that Microsoft is just so dysfunctional that id would never be allowed to produce another good game anyway. But the people losing their jobs here might be financially better off just leaving the game industry entirely. In particular, if the engine devs were totally cut, it's not clear to me that there's room for a studio to differentiate itself with a custom engine in the modern day.
> There's no real evidence in here that the IDTech team or the "coders" were specifically let go
Scott Miller said it himself:
> Big day today at Id Software [...] today, Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go [...] With literally the best of the best coders in the industry.
I like Scott Miller but he doesn't work there and "insider" information after layoffs is almost always part of a PR game by one side or the other. Again, not saying he is wrong, just that a tweet from someone secondhand really doesn't do it for me as evidence anymore.
We might not hear much on that until tomorrow, since most iDTech development was out of the Frankfurt studio. If they're shutting down Frankfurt, it'd be worth getting antennae out.
Looking at LinkedIn, I see mostly people from tech (design tooling, game AI, QA), art (modeling, mats, UI, character), design (levels, gameplay), and production roles in DFW being cut, but haven't seen engine roles or Frankfurt-based employees.
ZeniMax's QA team was notably unionized in 2023: https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/quality-assurance-worker...
Thanks for reminding me to be more critical in my reception of news.
I'm probably not alone but I didn't buy any of the doom or quake games for the storytelling or IP, I bought it for the engine. They were foremost a game engine company. Switching to UE5 now makes it compete on the same level as other UE5 games, and there's a lot of those already. Kiss of death for the company if you ask me.
Microsoft EEE at its best: gobble up all game studios and then kill them.
Microsoft needs to be split, it should been split years ago, but now more than ever.
> at its best
This looks more like simple corporate incompetence. They never should have made those very expensive acquisitions.
They should never have been allowed to make those acquisitions. Especially after they misled the FTC about Activision/Blizzard remaining independent and easily spun off again, and then immediately fired 1900 people afterwards forcing them to integrate more tightly into Microsoft gaming.
The FTC isn't there to stop corporations from making mistakes.
Subsequent events show concerns of monopolization were misplaced.
> The FTC isn't there to stop corporations from making mistakes.
That's not the point parent is trying to make either, but FTC was supposed to prevent detrimental anti-competitive and monopolistic behaviors, which that very much was.
I don't think you can view the horrific performance of MSFT's gaming division as an example of successful anticompetitive behavior. It is not in any way sustainable, as demonstrated by their slash and burn actions now.
And you're arguing that FTC should only act against potentially successful anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior? Who cares how high the chance of "success" (from Microsoft's POV), shitty behaviour is shitty behaviour, regardless or not if it's successful.
Yes, let's penalize entities for pre-crime. What could possibly be wrong with that? /s
Prosecutable anticompetitive behavior doesn't require success or not. Antitrust law forbids "attempted monopolization" doesn't matter if the monopolist succeeds or not. Its about intent and systemic harm, and slash and burn tactics does often run afoul of antitrust laws. Its structural risk to the market, not precrime.
The FTC's role is to block mergers where the effect "may be substantially to lessen competition, or tend to create a monopoly." Merger review by design is predictive.
Microsoft EEE at its best: gobble up all game studios and then kill them.
"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" isn't applicable at all in this context though?
Of course not, but most folks poking at Microsoft are just borrowing their opinion from other people and regurgitating it for karma. I'm happy to crap on MS for bad decisions, but the constant "herp derp EEE" gets tired fast.
Yes, in this case it's a slightly different (and much more common) strategy - EEE was a bit of a Microsoft trademark but we see what's happening here much more widely, especially by massive companies as well as with PE. I'd say it'd be better described as AEE - Acquire, Enshittify, Extinguish...
EEE requires them to have succeeded to extinguish, not just be incompetent as to close them down.
I don’t think that applies here. They don’t have a monopoly on gaming, there are major competitors in the space, from Sony and Nintendo, as well as Steam/Indie devs. Buying some studios might be anticompetitive in some minor ways, for instance if you’re a huge elder scrolls or fallout fan, but there’s just too many games out there for that to possibly be a viable strategy at a macroscopic level.
Asha Sharma is managing the Xbox team like a hotel. Cut costs and boost profits. It works in the short run, but this is surely no way to run innovative game studios. Hopefully spinning these talented folks out will result in gaming innovation outside of Microsoft, because the vision inside Microsoft sure looks bleak.
Looks like Microsoft is desperate for more cash to burn on AI and making drastic decisions like this.
Sure the Xbox division wasn't doing amazing but still had $24B of revenue in 2025. For reference PlayStation made $30B that same year.
Within an order of magnitude. I would call this awash
It is quite inevitable that things like this happen whenever a big, soulless corporation ends up buying people who unique set of skills and talent.
Similar thing is happening in other areas of the industry, where companies like Vercel, Anthropic, OpenAI just keep buying companies and it is really hard to find a case where things turned out well.
I'm generally laissez-faire about corporate layoffs. Corporation should have the freedom to organize how they want.
Still, this sticks in my craw. Microsoft didn't just buy a game studio. They bought a fleet of studios, a non trivial segment of the entire video game market. And they did almost nothing with them, and then they just light the goodwill on fire. It isn't just the IP. It is the brand, the organizational work, the history. Just vaporized.
The least they could have done is sell the studios mostly intact.
I have a friend who works at Ubisoft. Even 10+ years ago, she clearly saw the writing on the wall - the massive developer/publisher consolidation was going terribly:
- Every studio uses their own custom set of tools and development practices. The economies of scale of merging studios together just doesn't really exist.
- The functional difference between most engines for consumers at this point is largely meaningless. There are no order of magnitude gains like there used to be. Most of the engineering is on the cloud services architecture or anti-cheat.
- The median "developer" at a game studio is not actually a very technical person. They mostly just spend their days inputting content and assets with the available tools.
- The value of a AAA game is not how innovative the gameplay is but how much content they were able to stuff into the game.
- Nobody cares about "exclusives" anymore when 90% of AAAs have interchangeable gameplay with other AAAs.
- The cost to start a new studio is negligible compared to the cost of acquiring existing IP.
IMO, people should stop chasing making AAA games or whatever nVidia pushed out. They should just build games instead of graphics demos that sometimes sold well.
They can stick to desktops 10 years ago, make smaller teams, and either build their own engine or use something that is not UE5.
Ten year old desktop users aren't exactly known for buying new games, especially at full price.
The average spending gaming hardware are the consoles. No one is going to start building a game targeting a Playstation 4 today, they'll target the 5 year old PS5.
15 years here of game development. Hoping to add some nuance to your viewpoint.
1. Yes. Every studio is optimizing for a different set of problems.
2. We don’t need to re-invent the wheel. There is a lot of value to the consumer in good engineering, and value to the designers. Adding content isn’t free.
3. The median “developer” is good at what they do and will meet the technical proficiency needed. If you’re a writer, or a 3D artist, I’m not going to expect you to be coding - but they all use Version Control, are in Engine, and are familiar with tooling.
4. AAA relies on content to reduce risk, but it is an active conversation on gameplay innovation. It’s hard to take a risk when you are on the hook for repaying millions of dollars to investors.
5. Nintendo sell hardware based on their “exclusives”. Sony know this and invest heavily, they are no longer supporting PC releases (see: GoW).
6. If this was true, every team would be a startup flipping assets. This isn’t the case, not just because new studios don’t have pipelines or internal/external infrastructure.
The business of games is in part the game product. But it’s much more than this- it’s relationships with vendors, platforms, other studios too.
I wonder how much a blow this will be for Vulkan on Windows. idTech was always known for strongly preferring the Khronos 3D APIs over Direct3D and the fewer native Vulkan games are released on Windows the less pressure there is on the GPU vendors to fix and optimize their Windows Vulkan drivers.
Windows is pretty much speed running into gaming irrelevance. Valve is gaining momentum as days pass and Microsoft doesn't care enough.
Windows as a platform might become irrelevant, but the convenience and robustness of the Win32+D3D API combo for game development simply has no equal on Linux (except Proton of course). I trust Valve and the Proton team to have a fallback plan though. The desktop Linux community (if it can be called that) is too fragmented to come up with a solution. In this case more centralization (of development efforts) would be a good thing. But I don't see native Linux ports taking off for at least the next decade. Proton is just too good for that to happen ;)
This is a mistake. The last 2 doom games sold quite well and have a unique look and feel that is associated with idtech. This could backfire on Microsoft big time.
One could have anticipated XBox getting slowly destroyed by appointing a young clueless outsider as its boss.
I think this is more discovering the rot left from the previous leadership who sat around for years and years on their bad decisions, and then using the young clueless outsider as the face.
RIP to the end of an era.
Was IdTech used outside of Id? Or was it just a Doom series thing as of recently?
Wolfenstein series and recent Indiana Jones game were made in IdTech.
Wow, TIL Indiana was made with IdTech
Not sure if I'd call that outside Id as its all Zenimax.
Didn't love the gameplay but the Indiana Jones game looks absolutely phenomenal.
This explains the connection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MachineGames#History
I wonder what's happening to MachineGames...
Wolfenstein is great lore and art
And ran like melted butter. What a great engine.
The newer stuff? That's what I think is great like New Colossus from a visual perspective
IdTech 3-6 was used extensively by most FPS shooters back in the day.
Absolutely, the first versions until idTech 5 were open source and a number of important engines, like Source, derive from it.
Wikipedia actually has a family tree that's broader than I remembered: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Quake_-_...
The CoD series, Source games (Half Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead), Titanfall, etc.
Very interesting tree. Today I learned that the engine we used in college classes, ACKNEX, actually wasn't an idtech derivative. I could have sworn.
> the first versions until idTech 5 were open source and a number of important engines, like Source, derive from it
Huh? They were made open source when they were obsolete, Valve did license ID IP for the first Half Life but they paid for it. And that evolved indeed in Source.
Machine games and Arkane studio use IDtech.
It's also missing games, like American McGee's Alice.
Thanks for the share ... never knew so many great games were built on idTech and engines derived from it.
Source being based idTech is a pleasant surprise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech
Skin Deep by Blendo games, which came out in 2025, used Id Tech 4 (despite its age). Super fun game with a ton of personality!
I both completed and enjoyed Skin Deep, but liked Blendo's previous game "Quadrilateral Cowboy" a fair bit more. They're not the same sort of game, but both are quite stylish and both use id Tech 4.
The relationship was different. When Id licensed an engine, they threw the code over the fence, and games that used it often heavily modified the engine for their purpose. In contrast Epic put a ton of effort into making the UT engine a polished development tool for creating games.
early idtech engines were used in lots of games. Since Bethesda bought them they stopped licensing the engine to outside companies. However, Bethesda games could and did still use idtech.
Every single Call of Duty disc since at least CoD 3 has had "This product contains software technology licensed from Id Software ("Id Technology"). Id Technology © 1999-20* Id Software, Inc." printed on it.
Game devs have been heavily unionizing lately, including Blizzard and WotC. I wonder how long long it takes before we have a union game dev studio basically mutiny and completely disregard the instructions of the corporate suits, and force the choice of either shuttering the studio completely or caving to the workers.
Yesterday.
"In France, Arkane's management is beginning required consultation with its Works Council to review potential strategic options."
I’m happy every time takented people leave bad company.
Now they’re are free to create their own thing or join someone not as rotten as ms.
To be fair it looks like a rational decision from ms perspective. If being #1 in game engines is not a priority.
Appears hugged: https://archive.ph/EIiLP
This doesn't seem to be correct. Its amazing how one tweet can go so broad even when its not accurate. Tiago Sousa, Billy Khan, Phillip Hammer, Dominik Lazarek all seem like they are still at Id
I'm going to choose to look at this in a positive light. In the long term this talent will feed into more indie games and studios, and perhaps studios will be less inclined to get acquired by Microsoft and other big orgs going forward.
Much of the gaming industry outside the indie space has stagnated, making sequels that don't offer much outside of slight increases to graphical fidelity and the odd thematic switch.
There are a lot of people blaming the iD for having their own tech. Programming is partly an artistic endeavor. Games programming can especially be so, part of the market is based in novelty, and doing new things sometimes requires new/different capabilities.
I can only blame them for moving to RT only with their new Doom when they had insane performance on their previous games. Many toasters could easily hit 60fps in high settings.
Remember when Satya Nadella and Bobby Kotick got up in court and told everyone how all these giant Xbox mergers would be good for the consumer and went after Lina Khan for suggesting that maybe that wasn't the case?
Who woulda thunk they were full of crap...? (besides everyone who didn't have a financial stake in the deal)
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.
I am absolutely gutted. I remember reading the id Software .plan updates as they were made. I was a bit too young to follow Quake development, but the insiders view of Quake 2 and Quake 3 Arena was incredible to see happen.
And, yeah, I know that it was the id Tech team that was affected and not all of id Software, but it was the engine development that got me hooked.
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 while also working closely with the actual game designers, to make sure the tech was usable instead of obfuscatory or hindering to production.
The fact Microsoft just fired them all, at a time when their remaining studios desperately need help with their aging, shitty engines? I can’t think of a better indicator that they haven’t a fucking clue about what they’re doing, here.
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 made cheaper.
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.
The point is that MS is spending a crap ton of money to produce a product that is marginally better gameplay wise than a game like DUSK, which was made by a few people (I actually liked DUSK more but this isn't a game review thread). Not every game should be made on the cheap, but these game studios do cost a lot of money and suffer from diminishing returns. For how expensive these games are to make, they should be churning out ES sized games all the time. Instead the new DOOM is some 20ish hour campaign that costs MS a lot and the consumer a lot. I don't even think many people liked it compared to the last ones due to the slower movement.
It's not fair to these people that they lost their jobs but also they work in a risky low margin business and as you go for more and more advanced graphics and tech, the lower the margins.
A software company with less than 500 employees and more than 100 MUSD in annual revenue and you're asking me to please think of the vulture capitalists that gutted it?
If every employee makes 100k (let's say that's an average. Some make more, some make less). That 50m in salary alone, not including benefits like 401k or health insurance. And that's just people costs. Doom dark ages sold somewhere between 800k-1m is the estimate. At 70$ a copy they might not have broken even if the lower end of the sales target is what was hit if you take into account benefits and people buying the game on sale.
I'm not saying to sympathize with the MS, but they blew a lot of money on a worse game than doom eternal or 2016 doom. It's just not penciling out I guess.
Game companies are always going through this and the only way to stay around a long time is to stay lean (like valve) and/or find a really lucrative business model.
Valve is a similar size to id tech. They have two tricks: be in a business other than games and be privately owned. The former gives them the ability to weather storms and the latter keeps the dagger away. This would not have happened if id were privately owned.
Notably MS is in a business other than games, so another way to frame this is "MS is losing and Valve is winning".
> Instead the new DOOM is some 20ish hour campaign that costs MS a lot and the consumer a lot. I don't even think many people liked it compared to the last ones due to the slower movement.
I’ve been playing doom since the original release and I loved it. Different, but I don’t need it to the the same, because the originals and a never ending stream of wads exist.
I think I’m in a minority here. But I really enjoyed it.
No more DOOM games (((
Or future releases will just use Unreal Engine or something pre-existing :(
They were 100% working on the next game with idTech. Now the next release will for sure be delayed by a couple of years.
Fuck Microsoft.
The new one is 67% off on Steam. Just got it myself
Don’t sell you company to Microsoft then
AB was publicly traded and the majority of shareholders voted yes.
IMHO, this move should lead to opening the source code of idTech. Such engine should be preserved any way.
I am sure even AI wouldn't f** up lay offs this badly, this is mind boggling. Can we replace the management with AI please?
I don't really understand. Id Software is owned by Microsoft? Why Microsoft can laying off employees of Id Software?
Yes. When ZeniMax owns Id, and Microsoft owns ZeniMax.
ZeniMax, the parent holding company of Bethesda Softworks/Bethesda Games, bought iD in 2009.[1] Microsoft bought ZeniMax for $7.5B in 2020 and assigned it to the Xbox division.[2] ZeniMax's board was subsequently dissolved, so it's entirely Microsoft.[3]
1: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/bethesda-parent...
2: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/09/21/welcoming-bethesda-to...
3: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/zenimax-board-of-directors...
If that isn't a perfect piece of antitrust evidence, how crazy is it that MS can reach across a whole industry and buy the company that bought the company that defined the games industry, with Carmack playing revenge of the nerds boy genius. Everything about it is perfect for a locally produced drama somewhere in eastern europe.
On the same day they release the new Dark Ages DLC. The game industry continues to be brutal.
DOOM was always intended to be brutal, but not like this
Makes sense. Game's done, don't need you any more while we rake in the profit.
Next: Blizzard
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.
Blizzard's golden goose is WoW, and WoW is an ideal IP for a software company: you have people who have been playing it for two decades who will continue to pay a subscription no matter what. The hard work was done decades ago. id, on the other hand, has to keep making better and better new games every couple of years, and each one is a risk.
There's a reason game companies want to move towards the digital-only subscription model, and Xbox has been going that way for some time. As "bad" as Blizzard is, it's got the right model. That's what they care about, not about workplace culture or innovation.
For me they are killing the goose.
WoW has become quite soulless after the changes where everyone gets the same end game equipment but you have to grind upgrade currency to improve it.
My wife and I used to play quite a bit but it doesn't really engage anymore. Perhaps we are getting too old, but we should be in the correct customer segment (mid 40 years old).
Now I have spun up a local wotlk server with player bots powered by ollama which is actually a bit fun again.
I agree, that approach to game development is soulless. I don't really play any new video games anymore. In the rare instance I do play games, it's something from 15+ years ago. The games were designed to be played, beaten, and that was it. It wasn't an effort to keep you locked in forever. It became that. Then it became a soulless effort to keep you locked in forever.
Unfortunately, soul doesn't matter. The quarterly statement does.
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.
lol
Diablo is currently in a bit of a resurgence, the latest expansion was quite good.
I'm sure both players love it
Diablo IV is not dead: https://mmo-population.com/today
Blizzard is such a shell now, that I doubt we'd notice.
A big chunks of Blizzard has already pre-emptively unionized for this exact reason.
I think it's their first big test of a layoff? Am interested to see how this plays out.
In any case, WoW has been stagnating for quite some time even before the merger. The devs act as though everything is slow because it needs to be. Classic+ could've been much better.
Do you think having a union means the entire organization can't get shitcanned? Ask all those auto workers whose jobs got shipped to Mexico over the years how much being unionized helped.
I hope they don't join the games industrty again but rather use their engineering skills for aerospace or robotics etc
Outrageous and insulting.
IDDQD to you all
Rip one of modern gamings best performing engines on older hardware (going by my experiences)
Can't wait for more terrible UE5 games.
Michael Maynard's tweet reads like Trump stuff. iD are obviously monumentally important in game history but I disagree with his points that the Doom, doom eternal and doom dark ages are the best fps games ever made. Doom was revolutionary, but are we really going to say the other two are up there? I don't think they'd even be in my top twenty.
I get that he's angry and hurt and defending his colleagues but telling me doom dark ages is better than half-life 2 is just picking a fight
It's Nokia all over again: Having all ingredients for success and yet stubbornly not succeeding.
Fast forward a few years “where did all our institutional knowledge about performance and rendering go??”
So utterly predictable it’s infuriating
Looking at Asha Sharma's track record of having no experience in anything related to gaming, don't color me surprised when in 6 months the foisted narrative will be 'well, do we even need an Xbox?'
Phil Spencer had already put it in the ditch by the time she took over. “Everything is an Xbox” was a joke of a strategy, spending $70 billion on a company with a weak slate in the Activision purchase
I'm not sure thats all on Phil. He was told they needed 30% profit margins or else. He was grasping and trying to make that happen when they only had 12% (market average was something like 10). This really feels like Phil was setup to take a fall and Asha is swooping in to either be a hero or sell it all off so Microsoft can focus on AI.
That’s a fair point. I do think Game Pass was a major strategic misstep, but I assume they were also pushed to show regular recurring revenue which obviously flies in the face of a traditional game publisher’s revenue pattern.
q3dm17 for life.
Who designed that map?
Anyone know?
Did it appear First in quake or quake III?
First appeared in Quake 3 Arena’s public demo
I've seen Brandon James (KillMe) credited in multiple places.[1][2] James left iD mid-development of Quake 3, so the rest of the level design team likely also contributed after that point.[3]
1: https://www.quora.com/Quake-series-Who-was-the-level-designe...
2: https://www.shacknews.com/article/101156/rocket-jump-quake-a...
3: https://www.shacknews.com/article/181/more-on-bjames-id-depa...
Upon reading your comment I just booted quake3 in q3dm17 nightmare mode and immediately started having a blast. Was about to win the match but a bot took both the rail gun and the quad damage, it was a blood bath.
https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/
q3dm17 in the browser... what a time to be alive
My favorite was rail brushing people off during pad jumps. Because they died from hitting the level box, they would get a -1. At work we had a match where every other player had a negative score. That aid, they were good sports about it and I didn't do it all the time.
I was thinking, is that the space hopping map? Because I didn’t play much MP back in the day but that map was a blast.
Checked online and indeed that’s the one! I wonder what is the biggest online community nowadays that I can play MP with.
The only possible good Microsoft could do, in order to salvage their relationship with id software fans, would be to honor Carmack's legacy and release the RAGE engine (id tech 5) as open source. A lot of it was already released in the Doom 3 BFG release, might as well do the whole thing.
why wouldn't they just sell it?
I'm deeply opposed to game distribution companies (console makers) being allowed to acquire game studios.
In the same way that theaters and streaming services shouldn't be allowed to do acquisitions.
Disney owning whatever ridiculous proportion of media by buying everything serves nobody's best interest.
> why wouldn't they just sell it?
Because someone who cares might buy the brand and do something good with it and be a competitor. ID Software is still a strong brand, and it the hands of another gaming studio it might pose a threat.
> why wouldn't they just sell it?
Serious question, is there any kind of entities that can be owned, but not "dismantled", if you don't want it you need to try to sell or make it independant.
Would there be any chance to make it a thing when a company is bought?
I get the impression European companies are like this. In general if a company can't be reorganized/dismantled that makes it worth so little (or negative) that no one will acquire it.
It's fairly common for a studio to buy its independence and keep the team intact. You do need fresh money to make it worthwhile and give the new studio runway.
There's also the case where new teams can self organize to form new studios in the aftermath. That's also a factor on whether it makes sense to pay for the previous name or game license, or simply start over.
You can put various kinds of "poison pill" in the shareholder rights agreements which are binding contracts on both the company and its shareholders in response to events.
You can also make all sort of post acquisition agreements.
These usually take the form of making stock available at steep discounts in response to actions e.g. in the event of a 20% layoff any employee from the time of acquisition can purchase stock at $0.10 a share, any one laid off will get a million dollars severance, if acquirer shuts down the studio the original founders have the right to re-acquire all IP and trademarks for $1 -- those sorts of things.
This isn't a specific kind of entity, any business entity can have Shareholder Rights Agreements. It's a bit of a game to get the terms right so everything is in good faith and agreeable.
Likely one of two reasons, probably both:
1. Tax write off.
2. Acquiring a competitor, and then closing them down is a way to decrease competiton.
Either John or John should buy back the Id Software name
I don’t think they are interested or have the $$$. It probably worths like a billion?
Probably a good way to become a millionaire, in the Branson sense of the word.
valve would have the money......
Those that care don't have the money and those that have the money don't care.
makes zero sense, that's some top tier human capital
Really a sad day. DOOM was fantastic.
Unreal Engine has become a commodity, and it is easier to recruit people with experience - even CD Projekt Red gave up.
The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda.
I would not include Cloud Imperium here because they are forever in a beta state with no clear ship date in the future for their two games.
Also IO Interactive, Guerrilla Games, Santa Monica Studio
Technology advances and platform variation were a key part of why games where so exciting. It feels like that period is now over, it is difficult to get excited any of it now. The whole industry just seems stale and corporate. Or maybe I'm just old.
What's really odd is it is now easier than ever to create games but at the same time it feels like we won't see revolutionary games like doom, quake, Goldeneye or half life ever again. These were created by small teams that could inject their personality into them.
My other theory is game creation was previously so hard, it required genius level iq teams to do it so we quite regularly got mind blowingly amazing games. Now we get cut scenes instead.
> The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda.
Is Ubisoft's Anvil still alive or is it just in an unknown status after they cancelled a few upcoming titles?
That said, Capcom is still doing their own thing via RE Engine...
Not sure about any others...
I actually started my game now in LÖVE 2d.
> The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda.
Don't forget Nintendo. It's pretty damn impressive what they managed to pull off on the Switch with more or less circa-2015 Android hardware. Mario Odyssey looks beautiful and runs at a mostly stable 60fps.
Most major studios are using custom engines, Ubisoft, EA, Activision, Take2, Blizzard ect...
Some more earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810496
Related:
Resetting Xbox
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804993
So I guess $27B in _profit_ in Q1 alone this year isn't enough for MSFT.
Need to fire 3000 people to make ends meet.
Tough.
Naturally, Asha Sharma was in AI before this gig so expect slop games made in India in the future.
I never thought I'd want Steve Ballmer back. Things can always get worse.
Too bad they didn't double down and sell the Id Tech Engine and be a competitor to UE. Instead of folding.
They are moving most of their development to India, where it's pretty easy to find bottom-dollar UE5 dev shops.
Do they make good games though? Idk if game dev is like corporate software where it's already uncreative crap no one really is thrilled about.
A lot of games are, including some of the most popular franchises. Sequel mills often become like this
The rebooted Doom trilogy is more or less the only FPS games I've ever particularly enjoyed
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.
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.
Typically game/media studios run on contractors because of this. You'll be hired for maybe 3-6 months on a repeating contract, so that you can be let go at a moments notice.
For businesses the labour entry point is crowded, wages therefore are low. We find it more common to hire students and pay minimally, use exposure as the negotiating tool.
I know multiple publishers who advocate for that model; outsourcing, not so much. Unless they have a trusted partner, but at that point, they're essentially acting as an arm of the publisher.
All those devs need to get together and form their own studio, and then sell it back to Microsoft for $83 billion.
Oh wait...
The id Tech engine family is perhaps one of the greatest engine families in the industry, and this move tells me there is no technical leadership at Microsoft. We already knew there was no financial leadership.
So the question is, what's left? Because there's no gameplay leadership either, and that's the whole fucking point.
I was fired by microsoft last year, Satya said the layoff was not due to performance reasons and he refused to elaborate what it was. In the job market I had to explain at every interview why I was laid off. People still ask me why I left MS to work at my current less prestigious company when the learn I used to work there and I have to sheepishly repeat the lie I have memorised to make them go away.
Even when I was at MS I saw a culture of always being in firing and hiring mode. They fired people who were perfectly good at their jobs and hired people who needed to be trained and needed higher salaries.
Sorry Satya. I just can't trust MS with my career anymore and I dissuade more people from going there everyday. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I also worked in a public company that bought a lot of companies during the pandemic and had to sell or shut them down in the wake of 2024.
My cynical take is that a lot of VC/fund bros need their cash during the pandemic and they saw a high in the market so installed their friends to buy those assets. Scroll forward 5, 6 years, they now do the reverse to pump up stock prices of those parent companies and win big again.
It has nothing to do with the parent companies themselves. They are just a tool to pump and dump.
Perhaps also a bit of ageism. Always hard to prove. Often implicit.
Too much boomer nostalgia about iD. I get it I am old too but people need to understand that the world moves on.
The glory days of iD are long, long gone and Microsoft needs to start making some goddamn money on Xbox. And iD hasn't been pulling their weight.
What does this mean for the future of Doom?!! I hate this. Maybe we should have been sounding such an alarm when Microsoft was buying everyone.
When people think that tech is a meritocracy and being good means you won't be laid off, show them this.
What the fuck
$2.93 trillion market cap....layoffs
Bizarre incentives we have created
Their gaming division is not doing well.
Those are de facto separate organizations.
msft gaming likely has a negative market cap
Wow, 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 apparently this dev. If they were the best, they probably wouldn't be getting laid off right now.
They worked on the reboot games which are considered widely successful relative to other games released around the same time.
Sure, the tweet was about their releases since 2016 when I assume this particular dev was involved, not the original release. To be clear, I'm not saying their games aren't good or even that they didn't have some success. 20 million in sales for their entire franchise isn't bad, it isn't the 500 million in sales we see from CoD or Battlefield, but it isn't bad. I actually liked the games, but claiming they are the "BEST GAMES EVER!" and having the gall to mention Google where no Google results ever show them as the best is where I have an issue. We don't need to spread misinformation like that and if the dev actually believes this I can only assume they live in a bubble.
If numbers suggest quality than I guess McDonald’s makes the worlds best hamburger.
Time to unionize, Americans!
Interestingly, Id was led by John Carmack, who was also a big fan of VR. And Microsoft killed the AR/VR/MR teams a year ago.
So, I'm guessing internally there were some leadership hopes that IdTech would help support IVAS and related professional AR systems and when those failed to be adopted at scale, IdTech lost a key sponsor. I'm guessing it's been a rough year of internal advocacy since.
Carmack had left id by the time he got into vr/at, iirc they snagged him from a rocket company?
Armadillo Aerospace was Carmack's own rocket company.
And tbh I'm not sure it was ever a plausible contender for commercial success, more like Carmack wanted to play with rockets. But that might be unfair; I would happily accept a correction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace
Carmack hasn’t worked at id for 13 years
Carmack left id waaay before Microsoft has acquired id (transitively by acquiring Zenimax/Bethesda)
> Yet today, Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go
I feel that this is an incredibly unfair and demeaning take both towards Microsoft and towards the people being fired. As I see it, getting fired is just like being dumped by a romantic partner. It typically says very little about your value as an individual, and almost everything about their current situation and how the relationship with you fits into their future plans and the other opportunities available to them.
It’s nothing like a romantic relationship, and it does say something about msft: they failed at planning and managing company resources, and as a result fired a bunch of people
It sounds like you're fully agreeing with me that it has pretty much nothing to do with the value of the employees and essentially everything with how the employees no longer fit the company's plans.
I think if you read the words I wrote you’ll find I did not agree with your framing
I promise that I did, and I did not find that; you said that it's "nothing like" but then the rest of it seems to match what I was saying in my analogy. Would you mind please saying more about the difference you see between our opinions?
The problem with the romantic partner analogy is that when things ended with my ex, I didn't lose my career continuity, health insurance and income stream that goes to pay my rent.
Corporate culture spent the last fifty years convincing the working public that it was important to identify with your job, career, and most importantly, your employer. That's how you get the most out of a worker. If they identify themselves as - just as examples - "parent" or "spouse" first, those priorities can get in the way of their value creation for you.
The employer can, of course, drop you as an employee pretty much at-will. You'll be left with shame, disillusionment, and potential financial setbacks, but they'll have accumulated the value from your best efforts.
> didn't lose my career continuity, health insurance and income stream that goes to pay my rent.
But that is basically the minimum set of consequences for any homemaker or non-breadwinner when a marriage fails.
Think about women through the centuries, who’ve been faced with basically homelessness and poverty, and the full responsibility to all their children, if they divorced or separated.
And then it becomes crystal clear why many people cling to suboptimal and abusive relationships, because really, we need one another.
At least in today's world, there are things like alimony that are supposed to go to the prevention of that issue. It's not perfect, but it's at least something.
There's also an increase in the number of women who are able to independently support themselves.
People are also less likely to get married now for that exact reason.
If there were some sort of alimony for employment, even if just for a year, and a public health insurance option to fall back on, you probably don't see that much outrage from the people who have lost their jobs. But then, you'd also, at least in the minds of certain employers, see less willingness on the behalf of employees to throw their whole lives into the production of value for the business, and I think that's part of why you don't see guaranteed severance and public health insurance in the US.
Nice downplay. This is getting dumped by a romantic partner who supported you by paying for your rent, food and other needs/wants.