Board 8 > Is there a more important Gamedev company than Epic Games?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I've been thinking about this for a while. Setting aside the console makers (So Ninty, Sony and Microsoft), does anybody else come close to being as important to gaming as Epic has been in the last 20 years? More games use the Unreal Engine than pretty much anything else by a fairly wide margin. Id kinda, sorta was in a similar position circa the Quake 2-3 eras, but Epic started running circles around them 'round the time of Doom 3 and hasn't stopped being way more relevant ever since.
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blizzard
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are we ignoring Steam with respect to Valve's influence
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Valve could theoretically make almost every modern PC game vanish, that's pretty important. Although I don't know if they count as a game developer company any more.
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if epic counts as a game dev then valve counts too
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Red Shifter posted...

if epic counts as a game dev then valve counts too

Well yeah, why wouldn't they?
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Valve > Epic > Blizzard imo
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th3l3fty posted...

are we ignoring Steam with respect to Valve's influence

No, it's just that when you said it my gut's immediate response was 'but valve makes no games'

Valve is iffy cause they made that steambox or whatever it is, IIRC. I think you could actually count them as console makers? But yeah, if you don't they're number 1 IMO, and Epic the obvious second.
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KanzarisKelshen posted...

th3l3fty posted...

are we ignoring Steam with respect to Valve's influence

No, it's just that when you said it my gut's immediate response was 'but valve makes no games'

Won't you look dumb when Half-Life 3 comes ou
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redrocket_pub posted...

KanzarisKelshen posted...

th3l3fty posted...

are we ignoring Steam with respect to Valve's influence

No, it's just that when you said it my gut's immediate response was 'but valve makes no games'

Won't you look dumb when Half-Life 3 comes ou

His skeleton will feel really stupid.
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Steam is important from a game distribution perspective, but not from a game development perspective.

If want to talk about Valve here then it would be about the contributions of the Source engine.
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KanzarisKelshen posted...

More games use the Unreal Engine than pretty much anything else by a fairly wide margin

Unity by a wide margin
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Epic Games is actually contributing help to one of the Star Wars attractions coming to Disney parks. I'd say that is pretty important.

foolm0r0n posted...

KanzarisKelshen posted...

More games use the Unreal Engine than pretty much anything else by a fairly wide margin

Unity by a wide margin

Unity definitely sees more use by indy games, but not major studios last I checked. I'm trying to look at when it launched on PC and started seeing widespread use but not finding much.
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What will come first Half Life 3 or Winds of Winter?
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KanzarisKelshen posted...

but not major studios last I checked

You might be surprised by how many AAA studios use it. Pretty much all VR/AR also. But in 5 years... it's gonna be dangerously pervasive, unless they screw something up.
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Valve
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KanzarisKelshen posted...

Unity definitely sees more use by indy games, but not major studios last I checked.

Nintendo, Konami, Square Enix, and Bandai are pretty huge

I think most Nintendo mobile games use Unity, at least their 3 biggest IPs were
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GuessMyUserName posted...

KanzarisKelshen posted...

Unity definitely sees more use by indy games, but not major studios last I checked.

Nintendo, Konami, Square Enix, and Bandai are pretty huge

I think most Nintendo mobile games use Unity, at least their 3 biggest IPs were

Well yes, mobile doesn't need Unreal Engine. I meant consoles/AAA PC releases. But Foolmo's answer covers what I meant - VR/AR is kind of as cutting edge and big money as it gets. It's very possible that Unity becomes the new industry standard, supplanting UE, unless Epic does something new to put Unity Tech on the defensive. It's kind of interesting how engine dominance works on a cycle of decades instead of years - there were about ten years of Id, then ten years of Epic, and now Unity's come along.
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At this point the choice between Unity and UE seems to just come down to the team's experience, and to a lesser extent the licensing model (% of revenue vs flat $ per dev per month). Both engines require deep customization to make any game (whether indie or AAA) and they have all the latest tech so there's not much difference in effort or quality. Unity used to be better at cross-platform but UE doesn't have a problem with that either (including mobile with UE has made a big push towards for obvious reason). Beyond that at the AAA level (and III nowadays) custom engines are still the most popular, and likely will be for a long time.

Unity though is making some really crazy moves right now that seem massive. Like, obsoleting custom engines kinda massive.
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Seriously? What are they toying with? Cause like, standard engines are already something like 20-25% of the marketshare, minimum. If Unity can take that to 50% or higher that's a massive deal.
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Part of it is an insane new parallelized coding system that reaches assembly level performance, and another part is very fine-grained control of the modules and pipelines so devs can pick and choose or entirely replace what ends up in the final engine. Basically the two biggest anxieties and deal-breakers for high end games.

It's crazy to think about and see their demos but then I go back to actually using the current version and I realize how far they have to go... but it is totally within reach and they have the right people working on it.
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...Man that really is a gamechanger. I don't know a ton about coding but I do know enough to know that even one of those things lets you make huge gains in time efficiency, code cleanliness and optimization. Both at once would pretty much make it stupid to go for an in-house engine for all but the most specific games.
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