3665

Completely agree.

3666

Not trying to single you out, but here’s my main issue with the “they kept supporting PC by not discontinuing Unreal Engine” argument - what do you think the incremental cost was of supporting an engine on PC that they had to keep supporting for consoles - which were becoming more like PCs with that generation - and that developers were going to keep working with on PCs to create content for those consoles anyway? I can’t imagine the added costs were very high.

3667

I thought that was Unity?

3668

Isn’t it weird that Id isn’t in the picture? Where did they go? They used to be the main choice for most games. It seems that their engine’s disappearance is what really drove the dominance of Epic’s engine.

3669

They fell behind, but the Zenimax purchase probably didn’t help.

3670

Carmack has said that he never really wanted to be in the engine support business, and was only dealing with it because he threw out large numbers and companies were willing to pay. Supporting the engine for a lot of external developers was taking too many resources away from their own game development and caused competing incentives towards how the engine should progress.

3671

I just think he didn’t enjoy it. Support is very different than working on your own behalf.

3672

You might be joking, but in case you’re not, both engines (Unreal Engine and Unity) are major players and have various pros and cons. Engine choice depends on a variety of factors; many game devs feel that UE is better when it comes to graphics and AAA games but Unity is preferred for smaller indy titles. These lines are blurring though and both engines provide amazing tools for those of us in the industry.

Since you mentioned Unity, I prolly don’t have to explain it’s value/presence. To better understand the impact of the Unreal Engine (and not just take my word for it), peek at the various awards it has garnered, including recent Emmys, and note the awards have been continuous for well over a decade.

3673

No, I wasn’t joking. By any measure I’ve been able to find, Unity has the highest percentage of use as an engine for games released. Epic’s engine is considered the technically superior engine for 3D projects while Unity is generally considered better for 2D projects. Both are fine and very popular engines. AAA studios are generally better suited to use Unreal Engine and indies generally like to use Unity.

All this leads me to wonder why he said that Epic is “the engine of gaming” when that does not appear to be true. I think it would be more accurate to say Epic is one of the two major engines of gaming.

3674

I agree.

3675

Yeah, they’re both solid engines with a lot of pros and cons that between them pretty much have the entire PC market locked up, minus the developers big enough to have their own in-house engines.

Epic is doing some pretty awesome stuff in terms of making their engine attractive to developers across the board, not just the big dogs. I’ve been impressed both with the games that have been built off of Unreal as well as their business acumen in distributing it.

3676

I’ve always loved Unreal Engine games. The the way that engine handles colors and lighting I have always just loved. And the performance is so good compared to Unity.

3677

I think there’s a distinction between what I said and what you’re suggesting I’m saying. :) I’m not saying they kept supporting the PC. I’m saying there was a financial incentive for them to continue selling an engine. From my perspective, they were willing to offload the risk of piracy to anyone who was willing to pay them in cold hard cash for their engine.

3678

Right, sorry, I didn’t mean to imply you were making that argument. That was more a general response to that argument, but directed at you since you framed it well.

3679

No; I think the opposite is likely true. BSA continues to report increasing piracy frequency across all software genres since 2008. I think the reason it’s less of an issue is that few developers (myself included) actually care about the piracy rate unless it negatively impacts our business (potentially through increased support requests or poisoning of the user base). Short of offering SaaS/GaaS, there’s not much I can do to swing that needle, and in my case, I don’t believe doing so would increase my revenue enough to offset the costs involved.

Fundamentally, as you noted there are more and better distribution methods available in 2019 than there were in 2008. So while piracy rates may have gone up, the number of potential customers that can be accessed has also increased dramatically.

Total agreement. In the PC space, it was Steam. In the music and ebook spaces, it was Apple, or Google, or Amazon, etc.

I don’t view it as Epic having ‘given up.’ They weren’t a company with effectively unlimited resources. They elected to use the resources they had available to them in order to focus on products that had a higher rate of return. This is where I don’t buy the loyalty claim. There’s nothing that inherently proves loyalty by using resources inefficiently.

If instead, you want to argue a competency claim, I could accept that: eg, Epic was potentially incompetent because they didn’t see the revenue potential in the future PC sector. But that also opens up a question of whether Steam/Gabe had some sort of better read on that space, if they were stubborn, or if they just got lucky.

Edit: There’s also the argument that Valve had sufficient revenue from Steam for them to ride the PC market into the ground if that was the trajectory. For a company that derived revenue from sales of individual products, this would have been a much riskier strategy.

3680

Sadly, the ‘pro developer’ stance of the Epic Games Store doesn’t extend to Epic’s own employees.

In a dozen interviews conducted by Polygon over a period of several months, current and former employees say they regularly worked in excess of 70-hour weeks, with some reporting 100-hour weeks. Contract staff in Epic’s quality assurance and customer service departments spoke of a stressful and hostile working environment in which working overtime — while officially voluntary — was an expected service to the company.

3681

This voluntary stuff is always BS. It’s just something they can hide under when claims come out, but it’s not true.

3682

Of course it is voluntary. You volunteer if you want to be part of the payroll process next week.

3683

“I know some people who just refused to work weekends, and then we missed a deadline because their part of the package wasn’t completed, and they were fired,” said another source. “People are losing their jobs because they don’t want to work these hours.”

“I was working at least 12-hour days, seven days a week, for at least four or five months,” said one source. “A lot of that was having to stay at work till 3 or 4 in the morning.”

Many of our sources said that refusing to work late hours represented a serious impediment to career advancement. Bosses expected workers to stay late, and to not complain.

Voluntary tho.

3684

Not bad. I totally ignored this WWZ game, I hadn’t seen any gameplay clip until 3 days before release. Saber Interactive are a very B-series dev, it was another zombie game (meh) and another licensed game (meh), in third person shooter format (kind of meh).