Article: What's Killing the Video Game Industry?

[theRepublic]

noname2200 said:

mrstickball said:
theRepublic - Yet if any other company used 1 engine, and stuck with it, costs would be similar to what Epic spent on Gears of War 1 & 2.

Was familiarity an advantage? Yes. Was the fact it's their engine an advantage? Yes.

But it's not like every other company couldn't have the same advantages of developing cost-cutting solutions for in-house engines.

The issue is that using custom solutions for any, and every, blockbuster is a very wasteful practice, when you throw it away immediately after your done with the project.

Sticking exclusively to one engine is increasingly common. In fact, it appears to be borderline mandatory for HD games. Capcom's made the MT Framework, Unreal Engine 3 is the workhorse of tons of games in all genres, Square-Enix was forced to make Crystal Tools this gen...out of sheer necessity, your advice to embrace middleware has been heeded. Killzone 2 is the one of the few exceptions to this rule, and I don't think it'll be repeated too much.

Of course, if it was really possible for most developers to make their own re-usable engine, they would have done so, rather than pay literally millions of bucks per game for each game to license someone else's tech. But making such an engine takes years, and millions upoin millions in precious programming expertise. If you're the majority of developers, your motto right now has to be "rock, meet hard place."

And again, I point out that Gears 2 was heavily outsourced. Mind you, that may well be the future of gaming too. Why not? The rest of us, including the most vaunted of professions, are already being screwed by outsourcing, so what's one more industry?

Good points, both of you.

I was just pointing out that Gears of War is the execption, not the rule, right now.

To add to Noname's point, Epic started work on UE4 in 2003.  It is supposed to be ready for next-gen, which I guess is around 2012 or so.  They are looking nearly a decade into the future with this engine.  I think that is why most developers don't bother to try to do this.