Jesus Christ that thread starter is so full of uninformed half truths, I don't even know where to start.
I know Unity is around, but that's generally for low level games.
As somebody who has been working with Unity since 2012, I can assure you that this was true years ago, but Unity has since caught up. What morons describe as "triple AAA feel" has little to do with the engine/renderer and more with asset quality, pipelines made for PBR, polish, voice acting, motion capturing etc.
The fact that UE is covering the higher budget market and Unity covers everything else, has more to do with marketing, market inertia, education in private "media schools" etc. Actually, those game courses at those schools usually teach both engines. It has also to do with the fact that the iPhone and the app store came at a better time for Unity, where UE3 had problems running on iPhone but Unity was there day one.
The big strength that Unity has is it's Asset Store and tooling ecosystem that this store provides. Unreal has the marketplace, but I have never seen the marketplace play a role as big for Unreal devs as the asset store does for Unity devs.
So, why haven't we seen any of the real high level alternatives to UE make a push for that third party market?
Crytek has tried with Cryengine, and that engine can make some stunning games, but the feedback is that its quite difficult to use.
Every engine is "difficult to use", once you dive deeper into them. CryEngines long-standing weakness was in-hand animations, but I don't know what the current situation is. Another problem is the Lua scripting language - that puts some devs off. But other than that, the lack of success of CryEngine has more to do with the near-bankruptcy of it's developer, market inertia etc.
It appears that there is more interest in keeping a first party engine proprietary and not allow others to use it.
Obviously there is a massive market for this, as Epic is making a shit ton from UE adoption, so why no one else?
The only thing I can think of is that a company like id with Idtech, just arnt set up for the support side of things, but if there's money in it surely it would vindicate it long term.
The great Sony engines I can understand not being multi, but you have a number of possibilities for this.
Idtech. Probably one of the best engine going around. There are a number of offshoots from it in the Bethesda studios, such as Arkanes engine.
I mean, even when Avalanche did Rage 2 for id, they used their own engine and not idtech that the first game ran on.
Because idtech 5 was specifically made with the memory constraints of the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3 in mind, where texture virtualization was the right answer. As soon as the next generation comes in, you have other things to worry about, i.e. asset streaming from slow physical hard drives, and of course the tooling.
And the higher level reason why third party engines have become less popular is simply that development teams have become so big as some point that pretty much every team has dedicated engine/tooling people on board. That point was reached 15 years ago, and that is why the Unreal and Quake engines were popular and almost a "must license" with many studios during the 90ties, trying to keep up with the engine wizards ... but not beyond.
Another reason is that with growing teams, bigger budgets and a gazillion assets to manage, the weight shifts away from engines (or rather: renderers, which is what morons often confuse with engines) and towards asset management. And asset managers is what tools like Unreal or Unity today often are. That is by the way the train that id somewhere in late 2000s missed and why Unreal took over.
The state of the engine market today (in the western world, obviously) has most to do with market inertia. What engineers can a company hire and what engines will they know? For what engine can I find online tutorials for? For what engine can I get a certification? What game studio recently went under and what engineers can I hire because of that? What engine will engineers use in a cheaper country that I will externalize my tech dev to?
As you can see, these questions have
zero to do with the quality of the engine, renderer or tool itself.
And we have already reached the next stage, where nobody cares anymore about the renderer, or in fact the asset management - because those are a given of any sophisticated tool. The next stage is the service ecosystem, that your tool is a part of. That is what Amazon Lumberyard or Google Stadia attempted, and they were not even bad attempts. Unity is currently trying to get everyone on board of their ecosystem and I would argue that they are a bit late.
I would have thought that one day MS would have done an engine to go against Epic. They have some of the best engines like idtech, Forzatech, Creation and um...Slipspace.
It just seems like such a Microsoft thing to do. They are Probably the most likely to do it. They have the resources, they have the tech and they have the money to push it against Unreal.
What say you?
Except that Unity
is basically a Microsoft product. Unity in the early years relied on Miguel de Icaza's work with the Mono project, but has since moved away and created their own infrastructure, which is very much rooted in all things Microsoft. It's no secret that Microsoft tried to buy Unity over the years (probably more than once). Right now, Unity often feels like the companion product for Microsoft VS, instead of the other way around.
