Yeah, "low and falling" for both of them.

There are only a handful of major engines today and it's been that way for years. Unreal, Unity, Frostbite .... a few games still roll their own but the costs of keeping up are getting extreme.

I really doubt the Unreal Engine developers feel abused. For one thing, the release schedules of engines and games are now to some extent disconnected. Games get whatever the engine can do. Epic isn't going to move mountains to add a feature to UE for a licensee unless they get a TON of money to do it.

Whilst this is true for a lot of cases, it doesn't always hold true for companies which consistently release highly profitable games, an example of such company is Travellers Tales in the UK. With their volume sales, the royalties outweigh paying for an internal team to develop the engine (multiple times over). You can check vgchartz to get some idea of their game sales, and if you are particularly inclined, use companies houe to drill down to get the P&L (although you may need to spend some time getting through their company structure to find the actual P&L which has the right information).

But for a lot of companies, using an existing engine is a no-brainer - even more so when the developer has no idea how well their game is going to do, using something like Unreal effectively means they share the risk with you.

It appears Travellers Tales makes almost exclusively Lego games. I doubt those require AAA level game engines. To clarify I was talking about high end 3D graphics.

We might also include engine component suppliers, such as Speed Tree, Physix, and (whoever makes) Bink Video.

Bink is made by the awesome Rad Game Tools. They have some really good engineers on their payroll (ryg, cbloom) and they're consistently churning out cool things :)

(Disclaimer: Not affiliated, but I enjoy reading their developer's blogs)

I didn't realize cbloom was a Rad person too. His "Library Writing Realizations" rant is both a) awesome and b) really hard to link to.

If you haven't seen it, go to http://cbloom.com/rants.html and search for the title.

I'd never heard of cbloom or his rants. That was an excellent read, thanks for sharing!

If you haven't read ryg's blog, you should. https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/

Thanks for the recommendation!

Its kind of amazing how Unity forced change on Epic though. In the X360-PS3 era they absolutely _dominated_ the market, the list of games built on UE during that time is insane. However, after that, Unity started to come up as it had much nicer licensing and as a response to that Epic made UE almost free to use for small studios and more palatable for big ones.

I don't think Unity forced change on Epic, Unity targeted the nascent indie market very well and was a great replacement for the deprecated XNA. I can't think of a AAA Unity title aside from Microsoft's Recore - which launched with problems at $40.

Epic's AAA market ended up with bigger budgets and a demand for more control, so many of them simply created their own engines. So most UE games seem to be big budget indie titles (Obduction, PUBG, Psychonauts 2) or tight budget AAA titles (Street Fighter V, Shenmue III)

At that point Epic were offering the UDK as the indie alternative. Unity absolutely showed them the way things were going in terms of monetizing technology. Especially given the at the time exorbitant license fees for UE3. Same thing happened at Crytek too.

Part of the continuing split of Unity indie and UE4 'AA/AAA' is less to do with the capabilities of each engine and more to do with who has the longest experience with each. They both are creeping in on one anothers turf in that respect.

Hearthstone is built with Unity.

> I can't think of a AAA Unity title aside from Microsoft's Recore

Cities Skylines?

> I don't think Unity forced change on Epic,

I know, I know, Correlation does not imply causation. But just from wikipedia:

> On March 19, 2014, at the Game Developers Conference, Epic Games released Unreal Engine 4, and all of its tools, features and complete C++ source code, to the development community through a new subscription model.

Same year Unity took best engine.

> In July 2014, Unity won the "Best Engine" award at the UK's annual Develop Industry Excellence Awards.[1]

Unity made Epic react.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Engine#Unreal_Engine_4 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine)#History

It may be that Unity/Unreal influenced each other but it was hardly reacting to the way the market was going. Many top AAA games are now made with Frostbite which isn't even available publicly at all, it's entirely EA proprietary. If "cheap and open" was such a clear trend Frostbite wouldn't exist.

Wikipedia's insane list of Unreal games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

Imagine the royalties.

In a sense, the amazing thing is that Epic changed. In the past, incumbents didn't, and failed. Today, companies know about this dynamic, and try to adapt and undercut themselves before an upstart can. It takes some steel to let go of all that short-term profit.

Even so, it may be too little too late for Epic. It's straightforward to drop prices, but difficult to change business models, release timeframes, market position in customer's minds, codebase, customer feedback from a new usage.

In a sense, the amazing thing is that Epic actually changed. In the past, incumbents didn't, and failed. Today, companies know about this dynamic, and try to adapt and undercut themselves before an upstart can. It takes some steel to let go of all that short-term profit.

Even so, it may be too little too late for Epic. It's straightforward to drop prices, but difficult to change business models, release timeframes, market position in customer's minds, codebase, customer feedback from a new usage.

Most AAA studios have "engine" programmers (they are called graphics programmers in the industry). Even if such a studio uses UE or some other licensed engine there are still programmers who are modifying it.

Graphics programming is not engine programming, although it can be viewed as a subset of it. Most large game studios have engine programmers that do very little graphics programming, if any. The majority of code in a game engine is not related to the renderer. I've worked in the industry on AAA and indie games and have worked in both roles, which are often different engineering teams.

I work in the industry now and had been since 90s. "Engine" roles, if exist, are for stuff like streaming, save/load etc. The thing described in TFA is graphics programming.