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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

>That's really bunk. I mean "only elite can do it" it claim. Sure, it's not something you can create in one day, but it's not something that out of reach either, especially when people are collaborating on it.

The graveyard of hundreds of abandoned open source game engines begs to disagree with you. I agree that it seems absurd, but you really can't underestimate the amount of man hours put into these things. Unreal has been under constant development for over 20 years.

It's the same as flight simulation. Why is there only one viable flight simulator (X-Plane) on the market? It's because that kind of coding is simply beyond 99% of developers, and it takes a huge well funded and focused team to make something state of the art.

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Same claims have been made about codecs. "Only elite can do it", "you can't make it open" and etc. Yet, we have great open collaborative projects today for state of the art video and audio codecs. So it's not a technical issue.

There’re are some difference between a codec or OS with a game engine. One is the user base. I think there’re simply not enough game developers to extensively use the open source engines, every single computer needs an OS and in most cases needs a codec. But not everyone is a game developer. Another one is requirements I guess. For OS and codecs, I think the requirements are much more defined and manageable, but for a game engine the user uses it to create something else, hence the capabilities needed from the game engine may change wildly per project.

And yet those codecs still aren't in hardware devices or widely implemented in all browsers.

I wouldn't cite open source codecs as a success story ...

A GUI toolkit is probably more on point and of the correct scale, and those also demonstrate that without significant backing from somewhere, progress doesn't get made at that level of complexity.

What about the hundreds of thousands of abandoned open source web apps/tools/libraries? I guess only a small few elite are able to write any functionining code at all, then?

A commercial quality game engine is a huge project, and as such, requires a huge projects worth of time and effort to build. Same as any other huge software project (which all have countless abandoned open source attempts). Remember that most open source projects start of tiny (one developer is common, certainly very few start off with more than a handful) and work on it in their free time, while commercial teams like Unity have hundreds of peolpe working on it full time.

The reason they are abandoned is typicaally that 1) the developers, who are doing it in their spare time, don’t have the time anymore; or 2) they get frustrated at the amount of work/lack of contributors/lack of interest and stop working on it; or 3) they simply lose interest and work on something else.

Its not lack of ability, its lack of time/motivation/interest to keep working on it for many, many years.

There are hundreds of abandoned open source anything. There's no barrier to entry and and no incentives to keep working on things when you're no longer interested in doing so. It doesn't mean anything.

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