Bethesda is the example I’ll use but I can see this applying to EA, CDPR, & others. Bethesda has their own game engine and even created Papyrus for scripting. I don’t know the economics of game studios very well but I would imagine that the time/labor has to be huge to create a custom engine, documentation, and then to keep up with everyone all the time. Then there is the risk of falling behind in terms of features (RTX). It must also make hiring a pain. It must suck having to learn a whole code base at the same time you’re learning a new language. Bethesda says that they have hired modders specifically because they demonstrate their talent with Bethesda’s creation kit.
I have looked for this answer elsewhere and I generally read the same things: Its too expensive for a studio to pay fees to an Epic games because Epic wants a cut which will scale with revenue. I have also heard the “right tool for the job” argument.
The countless dollars spent on salaries, equipment, benefits, etc do not scale down when you release a title that doesn’t do well. Plus this means in some cases you end up in a situation like Bethesda is now, overhauling the engine so that you can even start Starfield & TES VI. More games more often = less distributed risk per title right? Why not ditch the game engine dev in favor of a more aggressive release schedule? Its not like a Bethesda would pay the same price I pay for the engine. They would get the ‘Bethesda discount.’
As for the “right tool for the job” argument: If you have an obscure platform you’re targeting like the NDS, then yeah maybe that makes sense. After seeing the success of fortnite/pubg or EFT, I don’t see why more companies don’t go this route. I mean why not have raytracing today rather than 2 years from now? You can write all of your custom stuff on top of Unreal. The framework is so modular.
Last point: If more game studios just decided to be the game studio people and they let the game engine people be the game engine people, then wouldn’t there be more incentive for a company like Amazon to make Lumberyard better? Wouldn’t more game engines enter the market?
Thanks in advance