Comment by sombragris
1 day ago
> The amount of care and talent is unmatched in my professional career, and they are often working from incomplete (and changing) specifications towards a fixed deadline across multiple hardware targets.
I fully agree and I really admire people working on the industry. When I see great games which are unplayable in the low end because of stupidly high minimum hardware requirements, I understand game devs are simply responding to internal trends within the industry, and especially going for a practical outcome by using an established game engine (such as Unreal 5).
But at some time I hope this GPU crunch forces this same industry to allocate time and resources either at the engine or at the game level to truly optimize for a realistic low end.
the lead time for a new engine is about 7 years (on the low end).
I don’t think any company that has given up their internal engine could invest 7 years of effort without even having revenue from a game to show for it.
So the industry will likely rally around Unreal and Unity- and I think a handful of the major players will release their engines on license… but Unreal will eat them alive due to the investments in Dev UX (which is much-much higher than proprietary game engines IME). Otherwise the only engines that can really innovate are gated behind AAA publishers and their push for revenue (against investment for any other purpose).
All this to say, I’m sorry to disappoint you, its very unlikely.
Games will have to get smaller and have better revenues.
I'm not implying at all that every game company should develop their own in-house engine.
But maybe, just maybe, they could request Epic or Unity to optimize their engines better for the lower end.
You cant optimise the general case
Optimisation is almost universally about tradeoffs.
If you are a general engine, you can’t easily make those tradeoffs, and worse you have to build guardrails and tooling for many cases, slowing things down further.
The best we can hope for is even better profiling tools from Epic, but they’ve been doing that for the last couple of years since borderlands.