> $10mm is a rounding error

And you wont manage to achieve anything with that. Maybe Unity could spinoff its ad business (together with some major liabilities like Ricitelo and other execs) and then MS could buy the engine part.

$10mm each. $30mm backing and you could get a pretty solid tech base to build a game on. Especially since there are some great new libs out there for things like physics. The Horizon Zero Dawn lead programmer has an OSS MIT engine that is very advanced and less bloated than PhysX.

> $30mm backing

Realistically that would still only be enough to get something you can make a cool looking demo and that only run on desktop.

Building a general purpose engine that is suitable for many different workflows and run on pretty much every singe platform like Unity is very trick and takes a lot of time (and trial an error). Dev UX, APIs, platform integration, QA, all the third party packages and infrastructure are much harder to solve than shiny graphics or advanced physics. Whatever you come up with that $30mm is only likely to cover a small subset of use cases.

v1 you would not attempt to be the be-all-end-all. Target iOS and Android since those are core Unity markets and throw on PC+Switch as the secondaries.

$30mm is more than enough when you ditch legacy stuff like anything that isn't a Vulkan/DX11/Metal renderer.

> $30mm is more than enough

With the right team it might. Realistically they'd just under promise and undeliver (or not deliver at all).

> stuff like anything that isn't a Vulkan/DX11/Metal renderer.

That's also not the complicated part.

Traditional VC companies wouldn't work because they'll always enshittify. Even on consumer space, you can see enshittification from MS, Sony and Apple. I really don't see a reason why the companies you listed would need that 2% royalty at all honestly. They already get the 30% from the sales themselves, and could very well financially support the existence of an OSS game engine with no extra royalties. Sony and MS already develop the Unity and Unreal integration for their platforms without charging extra royalties.

The devs using the OSS engine also wouldn't be stopped from spending resources on making the engine better for their uses (and in turn, making it also better for everyone), similarly how it works with Linux.