I remember reading an interview with a well known person in the 3D and gaming industry in a gaming magazine well over a decade ago. I can barley recall the details but one thing that stuck out was the interviewer asked why couldn't the game engine be the API giving the developers higher level tools instead of OpenGL or direct 3d, as well as audio, input and others. The answer was that game engines were too focused and not flexible enough to be used as a kitted API.
Fast forward to today and that is exactly what Unreal and Unity have achieved. They built game engines that are flexible enough to be complete tool kits to build other games. Interesting to see how far we have progressed.
There are also trade offs in flexibility that come with using Unity or Unreal. They make it easy to make games that fit within their paradigms but it's relatively harder to make a game that does something radical or experimental with rendering or physics.
I say this as someone who lives in Unity. It's absolutely the right choice in many situations but it's not without tradeoffs and compromises.
Many old style AAA developers see using off the shelf middleware as heresy.
Also triple AAA isn't that old! There's not a generation retiring quite yet :) People who want to still be in the industry are. I've seen the industry get older on average as I've worked in it.
Forms of middleware have been there since the early days of AAA style games - sound, video encoding etc. such as RAD Game Tools
If I recall correctly, Tribes was one of the first ones to have some moderate adoption.
I think the turning point came when the work to write a new engine became greater than the work to use an off the shelf and make it your own. And that only came about as people's expectations for physics, lighting, etc got pushed ever more.
Now if I can only hunt down those bastards who made Tempest, Qix, and Galaga...
And on the low end you have the Unity asset store run amok.
I'm not sure how you do it, but there is a happy middle of reasonable risk with reasonable competency missing in the market. There are few games made there every year, but they are a paltry few next to the regurgitated annual CoD game or the thousand random shovelwares put on Steam every month.
Bear in mind everything that's not included in this analysis: AI, mesh deformation, level logic, player mechanics, enemy mechanics, all the lower level stuff and so many things I haven't even thought of.
Good games? Depending on your outlook, yeah. But there's nothing really...different? About them?
Their anticheat, maybe? It's a bit impressive.
And that is why nearly 95% FPS games are practically clone of each other.
Such as mountains of bloatware/shovelware template games clogging up every single online store and platform.
The solution is better curation and discoverability. Not harsher gate-keepers and horribly difficult development.
So many incredible games wouldn't exist without modern development tools. Just because you were mildly inconvenienced the last you time browsed an app store, don't wish it all away.
It's because there are so many crappy games on Steam that it makes it all but impossible for indie developers with decent games to be discovered. The perception that Steam is a cesspool of con-artists and incompetents depresses the perceived value of any game on the platform not released by a known publisher, meaning any independent game is more likely to fail merely by being associated with Steam to begin with. Also because the last time the video game market was drowning in mediocrity, it crashed.
I mean... when I was in high school I used to doodle Mario levels on my schoolbook jackets because I was just that kind of nerd, and now I live in the glorious future of Unity and Godot and Game Maker and C++ and SDL2 if I want to be a masochist. It's fantastic that anyone can more or less make something that can at least theoretically be called a "game." But that doesn't mean all of it deserves to be on the open market.
>If we want to go back to publishers controlling access, who in their right mind would approve Schenzen IO?
You're right, if it were up to publishers no one would be making anything but MOBAs and first person shooters and maybe Candy Crush clones. Independent game development allows niche and non-profitable genres to thrive. However, again, it's still a problem that the sheer bulk of garbage on these platforms makes it difficult to find that good content without some kind of gatekeeping.
There is crap in all kinds of artistic work, for some reason devs seem to think they should be special and get everything for free.
I disagree.. playing a guitar does make one a musician, and writing does make one a writer. What either is not entitled to is success in the marketplace, but then, no one is, regardless of skill. Once you put your work into the marketplace, the market decides its value, and your value by proxy. But for that to work successfully, the marketplace has to efficiently sort for quality, and one way to enforce quality is having the barriers to entry be sufficiently high. In practice, that doesn't often work because entrants don't want to be sorted efficiently, they want to be sorted to the top to maximize exposure and revenue. It's why SEO exists - to optimize the Googlebot for you and you alone by any means necessary. Unfortunately, Steam also wants to maximize the size of its library and revenue, so it has an incentive to engineer a marketplace that favors quantity over quality.
But even amateurs put in more effort than the developers publishing much of the garbage onto Steam - using the term "developers" loosely. These are incoherent rage games or weekend projects, barely functional tech demos and tutorial games, asset flips, etc. Games that don't even run. If the bar for quality on Steam was merely "amateur" then I would be happy, but it isn't. There seems to be no bar, and that makes it bad for everyone, except maybe Valve.
I had tons of floppies and CDs with shovelware for ZX Spectrum, MS-DOS, Amiga and Windows 3.x, 9x, Linux,....
All before Unreal or Unity ever happened.
The reality is, every single engineer who built the very optimized engines you my have in mind (that power a few specific games at most) have great respect for Unity and Unreal.
Game development is a small world, people know each other across companies, share tech stuff on Twitter and go to the same conferences.