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Comment by SXX | Hacker News Reader

Building own engine and tools is not financially viable for 99% of game development companies.

Major developers are too focused on things that hardly matter like cutting edge graphics, and hardly interested in things that do like gameplay. Indie is where people are more forgiving, and keeping as much profit matters. Thus in house engine development is a more viable strategy.

I am co-founder of indie game company. Like in any business there is tons of things you have to deal with: hr and managing people, making good game prototypes and pitches, finding funding or publisher, negotiating contracts, crunching for milestones and release.

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.

Thing is you only have to make the engine once. Most publishers just tweak their engine to fit the game over the years.

There are lots of frameworks people can build on. So it doesn't have to be from scratch.

That's too bad. I guess for profit companies won't then and actual decent human people with more incentives in their lives than only profit will continue to do so.

Humans actually need to eat more than for-profit companies do.

You're all (everyone who replied to my comment) assuming that human game developers only develop games so that they can earn money off them. It's HN so that's not weird, pretty much everyone here has their for-profit blinders on. But what if I told you that not all human behavior is done for profit? Including game development.

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.

Even without profit in mind: sometimes you just want to build a game.

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.

That position doesn't make any sense to me.

Why should "decent human people" who want to build a cool game be forced to first build an engine for it?

I wish to just work on making cool games, but unfortunately my damn landlord and grocery store only care about profit and charge me money every time I have to deal with them.

If anything ONLY huge for-profit companies have the knowledge and resources to build their own engines. Without Unity or whatever takes its place thousands of indie devs would never have get off the ground.

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