Tags: Gaming
Sorry but I need to rant, naturally this was spurred by people spewing nonsense online. I don’t work in the games industry, so if that bothers you then you may want to stop reading.
People get pretty worked up about PC optimization, and people usually point to the game’s choice of engine being to blame. For example people are finger-wagging at Capcom for shipping crappy PC releases of their games but blaming the engine. In the same breath, they mutter that switching to Unreal Engine would magically fix their issues. That isn’t to say that custom engines could and have had problems but I don’t think this argument makes sense in the first place.
If Capcom really wanted to, they can move Heaven and Earth - using even a tiny portion of their >¥50B in income - to fix every single technical issue in the game (in an unrealistic world where every employee could be assigned to that task.) The reason why they don’t is simple and unavoidable: they can afford to ignore them1. Thankfully people are slowly picking up on this idea, but too many gamers are still stuck on the idea that the true reason must be because of a technical decision. I disagree, especially from behemoth-class studios who almost certainly have enough talent (or the money to pay) to fix said issues regardless of what technology they happened to use.
There’s two big benefits to switching Unreal from the studio perspective though: easier content creation and homogeneity2. Custom engines live and die by their tooling, if artists and designers can’t get their job done using your engine tooling then your product doesn’t get made. Next time you happen to scroll a game’s credits, look at all of the positions dedicated to just the engine, tooling and other supporting roles! 😍 On the flip-side, the idea of hiring “Unreal Developers” instead of training their own employees for a custom engine is going to be salivating for the games industry which famously cares about its workforce3. It probably makes outsourcing development so much easier, you can’t be caught abusing your workforce if they technically don’t work for you - right?
I do think there’s legitimate reasons for studios to switch to Unreal, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are usually the same companies that don’t respect their employees. It’s certainly no magic bullet, we’ve seen that much. Ultimately I think it’s for number-crunching: we need to pump out more “AAA” games in an industry that wants customers to pay more for less and under harsher conditions for their employees. That is total speculation though 🙈
That’s why I don’t really think the problem is Unreal Engine itself, but its increasing influence over the industry is worrying to me. There’s of course studios which are totally OK that just happen to pick Unreal, too. Either way, I’ll continue fawning over the select new games that are being shipped on custom engines!
Not to put too much of a fine point on this, the reason for delaying or ignoring performance fixes doesn’t have to be inherently negative. There could have been internal delays and some poor project manager had to choose between prioritizing content over fixing performance issues. I personally think this could have been avoided by pushing back release dates, but these situations are not only unknowable and also not mine to make (and probably not the manager’s either!) ↩︎
I don’t work in this industry, but when people are discussing a studio switching engines this point is always brought up. It also makes sense from a layman’s perspective, so I think there’s some truth to it. ↩︎
This isn’t exactly a very big “gotcha”. Generalization will inherently make you more replaceable, but this could have benefits for you as the individual. If your company fires or laid you off, you can easily find a position somewhere else (and hopefully nicer too!) I don’t know how well this actually works in practice. ↩︎
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