The damage is done. This whole debacle only confirms what I always knew to be true: you must build your own game engines and tooling.
Not everything has to be "financially viable" and return a profit. The best things in life are made by people without any profit motive at all.
It's easy to get sidetracked by "the engine" when all you wanted was to create a game... Most amateur gamedevs I know all started creating "the engine" and then the actual game never happened.
Why should "decent human people" who want to build a cool game be forced to first build an engine for it?
In case of majorify of indie games you only can only get $100,000-500,000 of funding total for one game with development time of 6-18 months. And like 50%+ of this money will go into creating art assets especially if we talk of pixel art.
Go look what is the salary of senior C++ programmer with experience working with graphics, audio and little bit of everything. And one person can hardly create anything close to game engine tooling unless he work for several years.
Making own game engine is the last any game developer gonna consider.
If you don't worry about writing an engine, and just write games without one, then as a side-effect you'll also be developing the core of an engine that's more specifically optimized for the sort of work that you actually do.
Eventually, it may become advantageous to make that into a formal engine, or it may not. Either way, you're still creating games.
This is demonstrably untrue. It wasn't all that long ago that there were no game engines available for use, and yet small devs managed to produce a ton of great games anyway. It is true that a small developer is unlikely to be able to produce a grand AAA-scale game in a reasonable time, though.
> Majority of game developers simply dont have skillset to work with audio, graphics APIs and cross platform support.
Then perhaps they should gain that skillset? I would have assumed that any game dev is well-versed in doing these things regardless, but if not, isn't that a problem?
Audience expectations for production quality of art, animations and overall gameplay has grown accordingly over the years. To become a success game dont have to be best of the best, but it's just cant be much worse than baseline of modern successful games.
If there is any indie games that you like and they were released less than 10 years ago please do a little research of how long they actually took to build. There are reasons why one-guy indie game production take 5-7 years.
> Then perhaps they should gain that skillset?
It's just too many skills and each of them take years of practice. If you take any modern game engine there will be dedicated programmers working on audio, graphics, networking, physics, etc.
If you have group of 3 rock start programmer buddies who can work full time for free then you might have some chances, but I doubt you will have any time left to actually make games.
Also even with your 3 buddies working for free process of making a game costs money. And if you tell the publishers or investors that your company building their own game engine no one will ever invest money into your project.
I know a number of successful game developers that are counterexamples to your thesis.
> If you take any modern game engine there will be dedicated programmers working on audio, graphics, networking, physics, etc.
Right, but that's to make a full engine. I'm arguing that you shouldn't make an engine at all.
Yes, if you're aiming at high production values, then you're looking at millions of dollars of investment and a full team.
But if you're looking to produce an excellent and successful game, the equation can be entirely different. You don't need top-notch graphics, top-notch sounds, etc. You just need to make a great game, and a great game is defined by the gameplay, not by the window dressing.
If you're a one-man shop, it absolutely is major factor in terms of what sort of games you can produce. There's no question about it. But it doesn't mean you can't produce excellent and successful games.
>you're still creating games.
No, every moment you're writing or debugging engine code is a moment you're not working on content.
The thing is, by the time the website is done, you have built a framework, and it's worse than all of the existing off-the-shelf frameworks you could've used.
From source perhaps