this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
842 points (99.2% liked)

Games

31792 readers
876 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

  1. Submissions have to be related to games

  2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

  3. No excessive self-promotion

  4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

  5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

  6. No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] AWittyUsername@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is the problem with being a whole company on the ecosystem of another, they can pull the rug at any time.

[–] reversebananimals@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The problem is that its so expensive to build from scratch. All Unity does is build just the engine, and that's enough to make it a 7000 person company. Trying to build a game engine and then an actual game on top is a herculean effort.

This is why open source software is so important. It enables these small companies to pool their resources and share an engine as long as they each contribute fixes back.

[–] Floey@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

7000 people is misleading. Being a general purpose game engine it has to be everything for everybody. An engine developed for a single game can be simpler, and once it is done, making the game will be simpler than it will be in Unity. Also those 7000 people are doing way more things than develop an engine.

That said, an engine like Unity can save a massive amount of time, especially for games that are medium scope. It's these games where developing engine code and tooling would both take a lot of time and the advantages would likely go unnoticed.

[–] jackoid@lemm.ee 22 points 1 year ago

Yeah this is why many bigger studios just use their own Engines even if they're shit.