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Comment by causality0 | Hacker News Reader

Before the popularity of commercial game engines, each game was built bespoke, which had some advantages, but took a lot of time, and made each port a chore. One of the greatest things Unity provided was a relatively easy pipeline to console releases, making ports more about platform quirks than full recoding.

This heavily implies Unity was responsible for the advent of commercial game engines and game engines being licensed to third party developers, which is bullshit. This was done with many game engines long before Unity, such as iD Tech, RenderWare, the Build engine, GoldSrc, the Unreal engine, even the GameMaker Studio engine.

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Unreal is the best comparison but the original statement isn't entirely bullshit. What Unity did (as does Unreal) is make the game engine more as a platform as the goal in and of itself. That is, wide feature set, mostly stable APIs, incorporating developer feedback, deprecation/evolution paths, etc... whereas other engines like idTech are more like a static library drop that you're expected to then tweak & adjust to your needs. And those other engines were often developed for a specific game, and then sold as more of a "why not?" than being the goal of the development. idtech, for example, was consistently developed very specifically for the id flagship game of the generation, and it's design decisions & tradeoffs reflected that. There's a reason that as widely used as the idTech 3 was at the time, it also was nearly exclusively used with FPS games - the engine wasn't a good fit for other things, and id wasn't really investing in changing that.

It's not unlike the library vs. framework debate of the modern JS world. Unity & Unreal are more frameworks, while most other engines are libraries.

RenderWare is a better comparison than Unreal, since Unreal was developed first as an engine for a flagship game and only later licensed out.

From Wikipedia on RenderWare: It was licensed over 200 times. The scope went towards an integrated middleware with low level APIs for rendering, physics, audio, AI all of which are extensible through plug-ins which also serve the official high-level API. The aim was to reduce the learning curve by also including service and support for licensees. With RenderWare Studio an integrated development environment including a debugger was included.[3] RenderWare themselves claimed a 70 % marketshare across studios that choose an external engine in 2003

> since Unreal was developed first as an engine for a flagship game and only later licensed out.

I was more referring to "modern" Unreal. Like UE4 didn't have any flagship game associated with it, at least not at launch. That transition seems to have happened over the life of UE3 which started life associated with a flagship game & genre, but by the end of it was a lot more diverse (such as Infinity Blade on iOS)

Good point about RenderWare, though

Source, GameBryo, LithTech, ...

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