Game engines have a unique cycle where cutting edge tech in one year has often turned into a kind technical debt a few years down the road. Thankfully, that cycle has slowed down a lot and things have started to stabilize in major areas like asset pipelines and editing (the true core of modern engines). But it still means that the decades of head start that one might assume shrink down because of the churn.

If you can fund and build a huge skilled team for about five years, you can still catch up enough to cover some game genres competitively and expand from there. But how do you recoup these costs in a market that is now clearly in a race to hit rock bottom?