nordlead said:
they do if it makes sense (Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 for example). Would you really want to have generic game x made with engine y just to save money or a little time or even to say we used engine y? I'm sure that they (just like every other software developer) reuses a lot of code and steal the appropriate parts of old engines to make new ones. However, Nintendo doesn't need to brag about the engine being used to gain interest in their game. |
I think it is actually much simpler than that ... Large Japanese game developers actually re-use a lot of code across games but this code is generally structured more as a collection of libraries than as a game engine.
Game engines really come out of the demands of PC development, where the permutations and combinations of targeted hardware and software make it difficult to produce stable code that is high performance in all (or at least most) configurations; and most of the games that used engines (primarily FPS games at first) had amazingly similar requirements.
Until recently, developers in Japan haven't needed to focus too heavily on releasing games to vastly different hardware set-ups; and developers from Japan have tended to produce games that were much more varied in style or structure limiting the appeal of focusing on developing an engine.
