Anon is not entirely wrong though... we have become pretty lazy regarding optimizing software.
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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Companies don't want to invest in creating their own engine anymore, so now we get unoptimized unreal engine games now.
If you have the talent and manpower to create your own engine, it’s better business to make that engine your product instead of whatever game you wanted to make.
I disagree here, making an engine you'd sell must be top notch in every aspect (or close to), an in-house engine only needs to get the job done for your game. Probably two orders of magnitude in needed workforce, depending on your needs ofc.
Very very few actual profitable companies roll their own engines.
Supercell has their own, but it’s because they started before there was anything available.
Indie games make their own engines but it’s more of a hobby or passion project, not something that can employ two dozen people to develop it.
From Software and Hideo Kojima would disagree. The highest form of passion for your game is to create an engine that gives it the exact gameplay formula you want it to have.
Of course corporate greedfucks cannot understand this, they only care about how many villas and yachts the profits will get them.
The advantage of making your own engine is that you can specialize for your specific gameplay.
If your game is something that needs it, definitely go for it.
Something like Noita comes to mind
Factorio to i believe
It’s not really that great of a business.
Epic is estimated to have made $275M revenue on Unreal engine in 2023, vs $4.7B on Fortnite
Unity made $614M revenue on engine & tools in 2024, in ads and monetization they made $1.2B
These are stable industry standard engines, if you start work on your challenging engine today it’ll take years to develop, gain game-developers interest and trust. And still you’re competing with giants that use their engines as loss-leaders.
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That's not the problem. But why spend time and money to optimize your assets if the gamers will buy better hardware instead and you can even strike a deal with a big vendor.
There is also the fact that graphic reached the point where marginal improvments require disproportionate amount of firepower.
Plus the im pretty sure that a lot of new features are made moreso to ease the work of developers and graphics improvments are nice side effects ( i think i read that ray tracing lightining is actually easier to do , alghtough you do need hybrid solutions while the games do not require ray tracing but that part is changing and we do have first games that require ray tracing ) . I think thats the reason we see a small renesance of AA games at this moment.
its harder to hire new devs if engine is built in house, because no one outside the company understands how to use said engine unless its open for the public to use. thats the biggest drawback of in house engines (other than the increased develepment life cycle to develop one)
its why for example, many 3rd party ports/remasters of old games use unity for example.
Using an inhouse engine makes sense only if you can retain a lot of talent. or have several projects that use it as a base.
Or your engine can do something that’s hard to do with Godot, Unity or Unreal
Which is increasingly unlikely.
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you have access to unreal engine source code, the problem is companies don't want to pay people to optimize engine
It's not laziness, it's bottom line and chasing the dollar. Management doesn't give a shit about optimization, just MVP (minimum viable product). Speaking as a developer, the mindset of 'we will fix it after deployment' is fucking everywhere.
It's also diminishing returns of investment. The more realistic you want to go, the more work you have to put in. Also more realism will mean certain other things will look even more jarring, so you're having a much higher standard for bugfixes.
Well yes, obviously it's a balancing act when making things look good, but optimization is about making what is there run well, not look better.
Except in 99.9% of cases nothing gets fixed after deployment either. That's just an excuse not to admit that from the get-go.
Yyyyyuyup
I will never understand the obsession around graphics. JUST MAKE IT FUN.
Here’s the reason AAA devs are obsessed with graphics:
It’s the only thing that differentiates them from indie devs.
Once you realize that indie devs can do anything and everything that a AAA game can do, except for creating tons of high detail 3D models, levels, and textures, you begin to see the AAA studio’s dilemma. If they don’t hire all those artists, level designers, and animators then they’re forced to compete with indie devs on gameplay, story, and features — none of which they can do!
Why is that? Because there are millions of indie game devs out there who are willing to spend many years of their lives trying out ideas that have close to zero chance of being successful and all the gamers out there are happy to pick that one in a million game which actually succeeds! For a AAA studio to step into that arena would be absolutely foolish.
It’s the same reason big corporations dominate book publishing but they don’t even bother trying to write books themselves.
Graphics can be part of the fun. What's so difficult to understand?
Good graphics are fine, but not at the expense of creativity and fun.
And the most fun graphics are stylized graphics!
It looks so marketing driven.
We are in decades of video games. Look at very old game and assess how "ugly" they are by today's standard while at their time they were "the best graphics ever seen in history!" or something.
And so, the big question: we were having fun with games decades ago already. If graphics were part of the fun, your brain should explode under the immensely higher level of fun you have on modern games vs 20y old games. And… well…nope. Same as before, just higher expectations.
very well said. I think the last time i got excited about graphics was when Final Fantasy X came out lol. then they kept getting more realistic but never actually became real, they stayed video games. even VR. so... maybe graphics aren't what we need to keep working on
EDIT: *aren't, not are, FUCK. I'm saying no matter how much graphics improve, it's still just a video game, good or bad
Games going for that uncanny valley aesthetic and not being nearly as efficient. I don't want a 1000W PSU just to run my graphics card.
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Of course, I don't want my game to look like utter dogshit, and graphics can be apart of the fun, but my biggest concerns with games are how they play and what the story/characters is like (if it's that type of game).
There can be times that I can appreciate more realistic looking games, but honestly it's boring to see so many games try the same style over and over again, especially when it isn't executed well. And if worrying about graphics causes my game to be an unoptimized game with a lackluster story, then I'd rather people just stick with a less detailed style to preserve the the fun (imo) part of games, which is literally everything else.
REbirth sure does look better than Fortnite, and REbirth sure does need a ton less of GPU and CPU.
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Seriously, way too many games are just generic garbage that advertise only on "look how realistic my game is, you're not a true gamer if the games you play don't make your computer sound like a jet engine!"
That's the HD remaster that came out like 10 years ago. They most certainly did not make that on windows 98.
It also helps that the game uses locked perspective scenes.
Not just that, but prerendered backgrounds, too.
All games could look like this if they got 48 hours to render each frame and their entire realtime render budget went to three character models, total and nothing else.
I mean, I dispute that games don't look better than that in the first place, too. Grainy embedded screenshot aside, the RE1 remake definitely doesn't look any better, even with all that, than the newer remakes.
Just to nitpick, the HD remaster is a remaster of the 2002 remake, so it's a bit older than 10 years.
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That's remastered...
I noticed that too, but I do think that the anon is talking about the remaster since he's also talking about Windows 98 and the remaster was out in 2002 while the original game was out in 1996. I know fuck all about the production of the remake, but maybe windows 98 was all they had available to them and maybe they did draw all the textures themselves for it. It'd have to look into that, though.
Am I stupid? Don't a lot games look like this in real time rendered graphics nowadays? What's anon talking about.
Yeah seriously, anyone can make beautiful prerendered graphics that look good running on any game system released in the past ~20 years (which is what RE1 uses). Doing in realtime is the hard part.
Anon, as usual, don't know what they're talking about
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Normal maps are pretty easy to make, they're just time-intensive.
I blame REmake for my impossibly high standards of what a remake should be
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Surely a master of unlocking would know
All screens were squares til like nearly 2010. Heck I have an early Nvidia GPU laptop around here somewhere with the most ridiculous looking 1:1 screen from like '08-ish.
Still peak gaming was MW3, CS, BF2-1942-2142. Back in the day, those were so good people ran successful brick and mortar businesses called internet cafés just for the masses to play those things or some oddie to hold w for hours ""playing"" WoW. Gaming sucks so bad it can't sustain a real brick and mortar business culture any more.
The golden era of cafés here was a bit earlier than that. Late Quake 3, early CS. The MMO I remember people playing by the hour to play was Ultima Online, not WoW.
Still, those were fun and don't get as much nostalgia as arcades, for some reason.
If you wanted to offer the same "we'll run these on decent hardware you probably don't have today" each seat would be like 5 grand to build and you'd need to somehow power 20-30 1000W machines running all day, so that's a bit of a challenge when everybody has high speed internet. It was easier to do that when people either didn't have Internet at all or were on dial-up modems that couldn't sustain playable games at all. The hardware you couldn't afford then was networking, which was cheap to set up and maintain for LAN by comparison.
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