Unreal! – Why Are Developers Clinging to Just One Engine?

gamesreviews.com:

The Unreal Engine has problems. On console it’s often running at sub-1080p resolutions, and stuttering is an issue across the board. Is it time for developers to start looking at other options?

It’s getting to be less and less of a surprise when a major video game franchise suddenly announces it’s going to be running on Unreal from here on out. Halo is the latest to fall, ditching its own engine and instead building future titles in Epic’s software instead. Fair enough. If part of the problem with Halo is having to create and maintain an engine, ditching it makes sense. Let that be someone else’s issue to solve.

It’s hard to feel too passionate about a game engine, and I suspect that’s why this doesn’t get the talking about that it probably deserves. It isn’t exclusivity or pre-order bonuses – something that’s immediately and obviously egregious to those it impacts. Most people probably don’t even realise many of the games they play are running on the same engine. Hell, some of them don’t know games are running on an engine in the first place. Who can blame them?

But there’s no doubt it impacts on everything. As a larger pool of publishers and developers stake their entire future on an external product, that product becomes more and more powerful. Gone are the days when every Unreal game looked faintly familiar, but there are still signs. Not least technical issues plaguing major releases on both consoles and PC.

It’s hard to pin down the blame for these issues. It’s clearly not as simple as waving a magic wand and it being fixed. Combined with everything else though, is it time to start thinking about alternatives?

There are no shortage of game engines out there, each of them with their own quirks. Some of suitable for AAA development, many of them aren’t. Most of the big publishers have their own engines, which have led to no shortage of internal problems too. It wasn’t unusual a few years ago to hear nightmare tales of developers struggling to put out games