Microsoft, one the world's greatest monopolists, bequeaths a game engine monopoly unto Epic Games, in one the biggest corporate blunders of all time.
If they were smarter about this, they would commoditize their compliment and open source the Doom The Dark Ages engine just like John Carmack did with the Quake 3 engine.
Yes. As I suggested in another thread: an open-source, modern IdTech would fill the empty quadrant in the Godot : Unity :: ____ : Unreal matrix.
A few mid-size studios pitching in to fund continued development on a Blender model could turn IdTech into a major competitor to Unreal Engine in a relatively short timeframe, ultimately costing them a lot less than licensing.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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)
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.