I am kind of curious how engine license fees translate over to a service like Game Pass. Is there some like equivalent sale metric similar to how they handle music?
I do agree that as Xbox gets bigger and bigger MS will want fewer hands in their pockets.
if your a third party putting your game on game pass then epics cut comes from whatever microsoft paid you to put your game on game pass. If your talking about microsofts own games then I would imagine that they are big enough to have a custom deal, for all we know when they purchased the gears of war ip from epic they also got a perpetual license to unreal engine.
I’ve thought more about this lately and I’ve looked at the id Tech engine a bit closer and…my conclusion is the same. Devs should use whatever they are most competent with and learning a new engine isn’t even worth the cost savings.
BUT…
Instead of targeting Epic, MS should leverage idTech and target a company now worth $50 billion…Roblox.
Creating an engine for Turn10 is one thing, but creating one for the general audience that can make games on their consoles or PC could be far more lucrative.
And yes, I remember Project Spark, but that had a host of issues (namely aggressive monetization) that hurt it.
I’ll leave it at that as I don’t want to derail the thread. I thought about the OP a bit more, and I looked at the years of tutorials and forums out there for Unity and Unreal and saw that MS/id are years behind in creating a multipurpose engine. But I think they can create a simplified version that can cater to a more lucrative set of customers: gamers.
Now with the addition of IW9 and Blizzards inhouse engine that they used for Diablo 4, theres even more tech that MS could leverage to make a super engine.
It just seems like a no brainer for MS.
MS is sitting on some great tech. The issue with taking on Epic is you need a dedicated team to do documentation and support. Back in the 90’s when I worked in the industry there was really only Unreal or Quake. The reason Unreal became so popular was even back then Epic had dedicated teams to handle support. That all came with the license agreement. Quake just came with a CD of the source code. If you wanted support you paid $1000 an hour to talk to Carmark and I believe the other person was Hook.
Sure, you would be right, but that culture of supporting a software program is second nature to Microsoft, as they do it will all their other products.
Its something they would be able to build up I think. If Crytek could do it, then MS surely could. Microsoft has the base engines to make a new one from. They have the two best game engines for FPS in Idtech and IW9. Both these engines are really optimised for performance, and produce stunning graphics as well. They have Forzatech which is the best optimised racing car engine out there, and with the changes made for Fable, it could also be a great open world engine as well. On top of that they Toys For Bobs internal engine for platformers, and then Blizzards for those isometric RPGs like Diablo.
If they were able to take the best of all of them, or even offer versions of the engine that suits the developer, then it would intergrate MS further into the gaming landscape. So they could have an engine environment called say “Xbox Engine”. It has three different engine available. One is suited to FPS, another for racing cars, another for RPGs, and the dev clicks on the one that suits their game design, and away they go.
The big thing MS would have to do is bring together a common interface for all those engines so that you could take what you learnt on say the FPS, and use it if you start a new game on a different engine.
One thing I am thinking might stop them doing it, is normally MS doesnt like to step on the toes of their partners business. So, maybe they dont want to upset Epic.