Taking UE away from competing platforms would immediately torpedo it’s adoption rates. No large company wants to license a 3rd party engine you can’t port to Sony and Nintendo platforms. It would subsequently drive everybody except 1st party and PC focused developers to the other competitors - Unity, CryEngine, and for those who can pull it off, in house tech. It would thusly substantially devalue what is the absolute dominant market force. It would also create a PR nightmare and destroy trust in Microsoft from their business partners, many of whom would have just got omega-fucked by such a move ruining their tech stacks for most of their games.
Microsoft has learned that when you want to be market leader with your enterprise software and middleware solutions, you put it everywhere. Office is on Mac, Android and iOS. Visual Studio is on Mac. Gamestack is platform agnostic, including Havok physics and Simplygon. In keeping with Microsoft’s historical practices, an acquisition of Epic games would see Unreal Engine remaining platform agnostic.
Honestly, it is even questionable if Unreal is going to last on XGS, they might as well transition to proprietary tech from their own studios, if Playground manages to transplant Forza Tech into Fable, then one can wonder if they will use it for more projects.
To counter Sony Spartacus i suggest MS buy some 1 big thinking Sega / WB Games & announce it the very same day that Playstation Plus Spartacus is release lol
Currently there’s no sign of a move like that. Several studios now under the Xbox umbrella made games on other engines in the past and have moved to Unreal, but there are no examples of the reverse being true.
A move like that requires some serious resourcing and central efforts to make it happen, otherwise the studios (especially smaller ones) are likely to prefer being able to hire and onboard people already deeply familiar with Unreal Engine, which is far and away the easiest engine to hire people with preexisting experience in.
I’m curious as to what Arkane Lyon will do. Austin already dumped idTech and CryEngine to move to UE. But Lyon still seems to be hiring for people to work on the in-house tech.
Nah, I don’t think it will be like that, you have Bethesda Creation 2.0, Id Tech (Void engine is a fork) and Forza Tech.
Weird thing is that you have all genres made on Unreal Engine, in theory moving all to Frostbite to save costs and stuff shouldn’t been a bad idea, especially when you consider that Mass Effect Andromeda was a walking disaster from the start due to developers massive disgreements and mismanagement until EA said “just ship the damn thing, you’re two years late”. But the engine was not adequate out of the box to just modify bits and done.
Arkane Austin is a funny case, the only studio to not use the in house engines.
Almost! Alpha Dog makes I think has only ever used Unity.
Obviously if we consider studios no longer using them, then we also have Ghostwire: Tokyo running on UE4 at Tango.
I assume that leadership eventually realized that it was impossible to keep everyone synced on up to date versions of idTech without radically expanding id and centralizing the tech efforts more closely, and since they weren’t going that route, the studios were all basically running with their own tech stacks in the end and extensively double handling a lot of things. Thus, they might as well just let people fly free and use whatever. The money saved by not paying a volume licence fee on UE4 is most likely smaller than the money saved by not having to actually build, maintain and R&D as much of the core engine stuff. You do get a lot of value out of Epic’s staff for both support and development.
Using UE also makes things significantly easier for hiring new employees, contractors and support studios. Epic is also spending massive amounts of money making sure their engine and tools are top of the line.
won’t be better to buy crytek ? imo cryengine is one of best engine out there, yeah i know the engine is falling behind but it problems only needs to throw more money at it. they can bundle Cryengine with xbox id deals to bring more devs to use engine for lower cost
They have like five engines in house. They should just unify them to two or three engines. The creation engine for RPGs. The Forza engine for Racing games. The Slip Space for the rest. Gather all the engine talent to work together instead of separately.
Engines aside. Todays news on Sony moving the needle a bit on a Game Pass rival should light a fire under MS.
I always thought that before the Bethesda acquisition, Sony had the chance to make a Game Pass subscription and completely dominate and steal the idea. Now that MS has Bethesda that won’t be such a landslide victory for Sony but still. It would definitely reinforce Sonys current lead.
MS needs to pump up the Game Pass library and features imo. They should copy that one service that allows you to play local co op online. Forget what it’s called but I think even Steam does it.
if we talks about engines right now, Xbox got really good and versatile engine and that it Id Tech 7. use that if you want to push your in house engine