All of this is true and has been true for decades in the game industry.

The other side of this seesaw is: Games are fundamentally in the novelty business. Players like some amount of familiarity, but they want new experiences. Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel. The flat-ish shading and floaty physics of Unity is a particularly visible example of this. So using a widely used game engine can put you at a disadvantage if you're trying to make a game that doesn't go with that grain and offers players something different.

As more studios consolidate on the same engine, more players will get tired of that sameness and reward other studios more. As more studios do their own thing, players will become saturated with novelty and the benefits of not using an engine will go down. There is no stable equilibrium.

I firmly believe if software engineering unionization ever starts to take hold, it'll begin with game developers.

There's a lot of money in gaming but the workers are treated like shit, as you pointed out.

This kind of argument has been made since the days of renderware.

I have seen a number of projects go from

'We're building our own engine'

To

'we should have just gone with $engine_of_the_day'

To

'We were so lucky we chose to make our own engine'

If you want to make a game like fortnight, the Unreal is your pick. If you want to try something that hasn't been done before you could do worse than rolling your own engine.

Especially if you are looking for where the fun is, the idiosyncrasies of your own engine gives you a world with it's own flavour if you incorporate that flavour into your design process you could create a feedback loop that turns into something special.

For me this falls apart on the consumer side of things.

UE5 games are manifestly lower quality than games built on custom engines. Optimization is especially worse. UE5's performance baseline _requires_ the use of upscalers (DLSS/FSR, fake/AI frames) in order to hit basic targets like 1080p@30fps.

I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. Homogeneity of this type is horrible for customers of the gaming sector.

> It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity

This has been the objective of the tech industry for years

>It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans.

Can we extend this elsewhere? Are tech companies' decision to use popular programming languages (eg. python) or software (eg. postgres) part of some dastardly ploy to make programmers "a replaceable commodity ... rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans"? Should all programmers push for having bespoke tech stacks at their companies so they can be "skilled artisans"?

This is ARC Raiders/Embark Studios. Games made by hoards of anonymous contractors and maintained by a skeleton crew incapable of iterating meaningfully on their product.

Sounds great until Epic realises they can charge whatever they like in licensing fees.

There's truth in the fact that it's easier to hire and ramp up on standardized tools.

It's a fallacy to extrapolate that into calling a team structure completely fungible. Throwing away an effective team that was able to ship a game is an incredible waste.

You're framing this as a thing done by a greedy corporation in an evil manner, which maybe it is, but it's also just a sign of the times.

For most of the 90s and 00s, your game engine, specifically idTech in this case, was a competitive advantage. Doom and Quake/2/3 all represented massive technological jumps over their predecessors and were way ahead of their competition in terms of looks. Games like Unreal (Tournament) and Tribes competed using their engines' strengths; those engines didn't look as good but were capable of rendering much larger spaces than idTech, and those games emphasized that, e.g. Tribes' massive multiplayer maps with vehicles, or classic UT maps like Facing Worlds and Lava Giant.

Then in the late 00s to 10s, things started to hit a wall. Probably peaking with Crysis in 2007, which is likely more remembered for its engine, graphics, and system requirements (all of which were truly mind-blowing at the time) than its actual gameplay. After that, games' graphics improved at a much slower rate; it started to be less about the engine's capabilities, which were increasingly homogenized, and more about art direction.

Now in the 2020s, we have UE5 for AAA games with high-fidelity graphics and Unity for everything else... what is the competitive advantage in maintaining your own engine? As you mention, you have to have internal expertise, which is less well-documented than UE5/Unity because you don't have dedicated documentation staff; you have to maintain your own tooling, which is likely worse because you haven't invested as much in it. From a ROI perspective, unless you're planning on investing so you can license out the engine and become a UE5/Unity competitor, it doesn't make sense to maintain your own engine.

And looking ahead, frankly, consumer GPUs are now so expensive that game graphics have likely peaked for at least a decade. There will simply not be better hardware available to gamers for the foreseeable future. Games "looking good" will be more about art style and direction, and you sadly do not need a team of game engine programmers for that.

It looks exactly like what Microsoft already did to its browser engine Trident, which was replaced by Google’s Blink on Edge.

You could just mandate that they make an API compatibility shim. Then they can't revolt and there is reference code for interfacing with the proprietary library.

it also makes your games worse. those general purpose engines all have a smell to them.

>It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans.

Jane Street hires devs at high salaries and makes them use OCaml rather than a more mainstream language. The company makes more money trading than traditional giants like JP Morgan do.

So just depends on if your strategy is right. I blame Microsoft incompetence.

the endless optimization of everything sure does strip out most enjoyable things, though. often it is these irreplaceable people who contribute the magic that makes their creations popular.

George Fan created "Plants vs. Zombies". After the success of PvZ (the first one) PopCap fired him and replaced him with someone much cheaper. PvZ2 was horrible. All subsequent games (the ones I've played) have been awful. So, money was saved. Money was probably made by microtransactions. But no one talks about PvZ anymore. The magic was torn out for profit.

And of course, there is really no down-side to low-wage contractors wielding UE5. /s

You're presenting this with ironic swipes like "bad things like ask for more money", but it's hard to read this description as anything but straightforwardly more efficient.

If there are few downsides to centralizing game engines, and the need for engine work is inherently cyclical, why should we want engine work to be internal and non-cyclical?

I really don't know much about game engines so maybe there are real downsides to that approach, but the way you've laid it out makes it seem as if Microsoft made the right decision here.

But it will result in a fat bonus for Asha Sharma.

The only thing that truly counts, for her.

What is the recipe?

Growth over a long period of time involves two things: consistency in vision, and willingness to take risks.

We do not have a market designed to reward these things, at least not for the likes of Microsoft. For them, it's far easier to simply cut people while collecting on their previous labor. Once the product of that previous labor is no longer as valuable, it can then simply be spun off or shut down permanently.

Have you ever watched Shaq fall?

Microsoft’s Modus Operandi.

In my experience, once organizations have enough history and size, they can't just pivot. Whatever happens within MS the organization makes it impossible for them to become anything other than what they've always been.

Their MO will always be EEE and they'll always (attempt to) abuse their monopoly power, while giving corpos and consumers just a glimmer of hope to keep them strung along...

Also any company they acquire will be gutted until it looks like the rest of the org.

They are unprofitable though. Profit margins of the entire Xbox division are less than just sticking the money in the bond market.

Not the OP, but Scott Miller said "most if not all" coders at ID were laid off. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/xbox-layoffs-july-2026

I hope the industry will be in a better place in a few years. There is this recurring theme of big companies rolling up little developers and destroying their development culture.

We might not hear much on that until tomorrow, since most iDTech development was out of the Frankfurt studio. If they're shutting down Frankfurt, it'd be worth getting antennae out.

Looking at LinkedIn, I see mostly people from tech (design tooling, game AI, QA), art (modeling, mats, UI, character), design (levels, gameplay), and production roles in DFW being cut, but haven't seen engine roles or Frankfurt-based employees.

ZeniMax's QA team was notably unionized in 2023: https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/quality-assurance-worker...

> There's no real evidence in here that the IDTech team or the "coders" were specifically let go

Scott Miller said it himself:

> Big day today at Id Software [...] today, Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go [...] With literally the best of the best coders in the industry.

What we know so far is just that id is "cutting a "significant number of staff":

https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3mpy...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Doom/comments/1up5pta/95_reportedly...

And I'm not sure I share your optimism that the industry will be better. It might not be worse, because it's possible that Microsoft is just so dysfunctional that id would never be allowed to produce another good game anyway. But the people losing their jobs here might be financially better off just leaving the game industry entirely. In particular, if the engine devs were totally cut, it's not clear to me that there's room for a studio to differentiate itself with a custom engine in the modern day.

What's the tweet it references then?

Yes. As I suggested in another thread: an open-source, modern IdTech would fill the empty quadrant in the Godot : Unity :: ____ : Unreal matrix.

A few mid-size studios pitching in to fund continued development on a Blender model could turn IdTech into a major competitor to Unreal Engine in a relatively short timeframe, ultimately costing them a lot less than licensing.

I think they should have moved Halo onto it instead of Unreal.

The industry is skewing heavily indie now, and there's no money in the indie game engine segment. Maybe a few AAA titles will be unhappy that Epic can negotiate more aggressively, but mostly this is a nothingburger, particularly given idTech's rep for batteries not included.

What monopoly did they gift? IdTech hasn't been licensed to external companies in over 15 years, and several major versions ago.

The last non-Id release on IdTech was Brink in 2011.

This is the thing that annoys me. They have the Fallout series hostage and moves like this sadden me because I can't expect the next game to particularly great when stuff like this happens.

> at its best

This looks more like simple corporate incompetence. They never should have made those very expensive acquisitions.

Microsoft EEE at its best: gobble up all game studios and then kill them.

"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" isn't applicable at all in this context though?

EEE requires them to have succeeded to extinguish, not just be incompetent as to close them down.

I don’t think that applies here. They don’t have a monopoly on gaming, there are major competitors in the space, from Sony and Nintendo, as well as Steam/Indie devs. Buying some studios might be anticompetitive in some minor ways, for instance if you’re a huge elder scrolls or fallout fan, but there’s just too many games out there for that to possibly be a viable strategy at a macroscopic level.

Absolutely, the first versions until idTech 5 were open source and a number of important engines, like Source, derive from it.

Wikipedia actually has a family tree that's broader than I remembered: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Quake_-_...

The CoD series, Source games (Half Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead), Titanfall, etc.

The relationship was different. When Id licensed an engine, they threw the code code over the fence, and games that used it often heavily modified the engine for their purpose. In contrast Epic put a ton of effort into making the UT engine a polished development tool for creating games.

Wolfenstein series and recent Indiana Jones game were made in IdTech.

Skin Deep by Blendo games, which came out in 2025, used Id Tech 4 (despite its age). Super fun game with a ton of personality!

IdTech 3-6 was used extensively by most FPS shooters back in the day.

Carmack left id waaay before Microsoft has acquired id (transitively by acquiring Zenimax/Bethesda)

Carmack hasn’t worked at id for 13 years

Carmack had left id by the time he got into vr/at, iirc they snagged him from a rocket company?

It’s nothing like a romantic relationship, and it does say something about msft: they failed at planning and managing company resources, and as a result fired a bunch of people

Nice downplay. This is getting dumped by a romantic partner who supported you by paying for your rent, food and other needs/wants.

The problem with the romantic partner analogy is that when things ended with my ex, I didn't lose my career continuity, health insurance and income stream that goes to pay my rent.

Corporate culture spent the last fifty years convincing the working public that it was important to identify with your job, career, and most importantly, your employer. That's how you get the most out of a worker. If they identify themselves as - just as examples - "parent" or "spouse" first, those priorities can get in the way of their value creation for you.

The employer can, of course, drop you as an employee pretty much at-will. You'll be left with shame, disillusionment, and potential financial setbacks, but they'll have accumulated the value from your best efforts.

Yesterday.

"In France, Arkane's management is beginning required consultation with its Works Council to review potential strategic options."

Or future releases will just use Unreal Engine or something pre-existing :(

AB was publicly traded and the majority of shareholders voted yes.

Considering how bad Blizzard has gotten the last 10 or so years, I would expect a bloodbath there. I don't know how they avoid it.

Blizzard is such a shell now, that I doubt we'd notice.

A big chunks of Blizzard has already pre-emptively unionized for this exact reason.

> why wouldn't they just sell it?

Because someone who cares might buy the brand and do something good with it and be a competitor. ID Software is still a strong brand, and it the hands of another gaming studio it might pose a threat.

> why wouldn't they just sell it?

Serious question, is there any kind of entities that can be owned, but not "dismantled", if you don't want it you need to try to sell or make it independant.

Would there be any chance to make it a thing when a company is bought?

Likely one of two reasons, probably both:

1. Tax write off.

2. Acquiring a competitor, and then closing them down is a way to decrease competiton.

Their gaming division is not doing well.

Those are de facto separate organizations.

Do you have a source for this ?

Do they make good games though? Idk if game dev is like corporate software where it's already uncreative crap no one really is thrilled about.

Phil Spencer had already put it in the ditch by the time she took over. “Everything is an Xbox” was a joke of a strategy, spending $70 billion on a company with a weak slate in the Activision purchase

Upon reading your comment I just booted quake3 in q3dm17 nightmare mode and immediately started having a blast. Was about to win the match but a bot took both the rail gun and the quad damage, it was a blood bath.

https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/

My favorite was rail brushing people off during pad jumps. Because they died from hitting the level box, they would get a -1. At work we had a match where every other player had a negative score. That aid, they were good sports about it and I didn't do it all the time.

Who designed that map?

Anyone know?

Did it appear First in quake or quake III?

Technology advances and platform variation were a key part of why games where so exciting. It feels like that period is now over, it is difficult to get excited any of it now. The whole industry just seems stale and corporate. Or maybe I'm just old.

What's really odd is it is now easier than ever to create games but at the same time it feels like we won't see revolutionary games like doom, quake, Goldeneye or half life ever again. These were created by small teams that could inject their personality into them.

My other theory is game creation was previously so hard, it required genius level iq teams to do it so we quite regularly got mind blowingly amazing games. Now we get cut scenes instead.

> The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda.

Is Ubisoft's Anvil still alive or is it just in an unknown status after they cancelled a few upcoming titles?

That said, Capcom is still doing their own thing via RE Engine...

Not sure about any others...

Also IO Interactive, Guerrilla Games, Santa Monica Studio

First of all, we're talking about Doom here. I doubt Doom is too alienating for heterosexual audiences. Doesn't that seem like an extremely inorganic segue into identity politics?

Secondly, The "go woke or broke" thing has been a Schrodinger's mantra used by grifters to sell outrage. Everything is woke until it succeeds, and then suddenly it was always predetermined to succeed. The market, on the whole, doesn't seem to care about or pay attention to these things as much as you imply. The worst examples, like Concord, are games that are shit across the board and compete in really crowded markets. The "Sweet baby" watch group on steam flagged Elden Ring, for christsake.

I for one cannot wait until people learn how to criticize games again. It's unfortunate good game criticism is being overtaken by to a crowd of tourusts that flatten game quality to a checklist of anti woke signifiers. It sucks.

I think the fact that you are not a gamer but the first thing you think of when you imagine what gamers care about is Sweet Baby Inc says more about the content you consume.

10 years of employment with a fat salary. Sounds horrible

What's the development cycle of a major game? If someone worked on multiple games from start to finish for a studio, how many games would they have completed in a ten year span? Do game studios allow developers to talk about anything and eveyrthing they're working on in public or do they have them work under non-disclosure agreements?

Although there are things to criticize in the Linkedin post, the moralization ego defense mechanism is not the one it employed.

ZeniMax, the parent holding company of Bethesda Softworks/Bethesda Games, bought iD in 2009.[1] Microsoft bought ZeniMax for $7.5B in 2020 and assigned it to the Xbox division.[2] ZeniMax's board was subsequently dissolved, so it's entirely Microsoft.[3]

1: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/bethesda-parent...

2: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/09/21/welcoming-bethesda-to...

3: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/zenimax-board-of-directors...

If that isn't a perfect piece of antitrust evidence, how crazy is it that MS can reach across a whole industry and buy the company that bought the company that defined the games industry, with Carmack playing revenge of the nerds boy genius. Everything about it is perfect for a locally produced drama somewhere in eastern europe.

Yes. When ZeniMax owns Id, and Microsoft owns ZeniMax.