| Reasonable said: I'll have to have a more detailed look, but I suspect that most big selling titles, whatever the genre, where on their own engines. In the end I think in many cases the more innovative developers also create the engine, tools, etc. GTA, Halo, Gears, MGS, etc are all on their own engines. Again, there are exceptions, but in many cases use of a middleware engine is either to cut costs or the route for lower tier developers - for example those wanting to put out an FPS and happy to leverage an engine that supports it. It's about cost vs return - but its not as simple as using someone else's engine means success. It might lower the cost but if the end game is very generic and/or buggy as a result it will likely not sell as well as a much better game with its own engine. At the end of the day its choice - and ID tech, Unreal engine do let developers chose which approach they want to take. I'll personally tend to favour big titles from companies that understand what they're delivering 'soup to nuts' such as Infinity Ward, Valve, Bungie, Rockstar, etc. |
Arguably one of the best FPS for years, Bioshock used a leased engine (Modified Unreal Engine)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioShock#Game_engine
BioShock uses a highly modified version of the Unreal Engine 2.5 technology used by other previous Irrational Games titles including SWAT 4, and SWAT 4: The Stetchkov Syndicate. In an interview at E3 in May 2006, Levine announced a Unreal Engine 3.0 features would also be integrated. Levine emphasized the enhanced water effects, which he claimed would be very impressive: "We've hired a water programmer and water artist, just for this game, and they're kicking ass and you've never seen water like this."[
This isn't a poor developer that chose this route it was a smart business decision to cut costs and have a solid base to spend more time building features. Stalker is a example of a game where the developer decided to build their own engine and as a result the game almost became vapourware getting it to work as they wanted. New engines are a double edged sword, they're fantastic if they work well but if you hit problems then they become an albatross around the neck of a project which is why leased engines are relatively risk free from a technical standpoint.
Neither method is right or wrong and both can produce sub standard games or AAA titles.
