<story><title>Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more open engines’</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/10/improbable-and-epic-games-establish-25m-fund-to-help-devs-move-to-more-open-engines-after-unity-debacle/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aphextron</author><text>&amp;gt;There should me more push for really open engines, as in FOSS. Unreal might be more open than Unity in some ways, but it&amp;#x27;s still not really open.&lt;p&gt;This just isn&amp;#x27;t possible with game engines. They are the single most advanced pieces of desktop software in existence. Sure, there are things like Godot that are perfectly suitable for a simple indie game. But making a AAA game engine requires the expertise of literally hundreds of top level senior engineers with advanced physics and mathematical knowledge. There&amp;#x27;s probably less than a few thousand people on earth with the level of skill and expertise to build something at the scale of UE4. Furthermore, open source is really the exception to the rule in game dev. Practically everything is done closed source with some kind of licensing fees involved. It&amp;#x27;s quite a different culture from web dev.</text></item><item><author>shmerl</author><text>There should me more push for really open engines, as in FOSS. Unreal might be more open than Unity in some ways, but it&amp;#x27;s still not really open.&lt;p&gt;And speaking of openness, didn&amp;#x27;t Epic push exclusivity approach recently in their store? That&amp;#x27;s bad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fzeroracer</author><text>This sounds more like an excuse rather than any sort of rational argument as to why game engines can&amp;#x27;t be open sourced. The reality is that there are plenty of projects out there helmed by incredibly talented engineers with extremely high level knowledge that exist in the open source realm; one only has to look at the geospatial community to see this.&lt;p&gt;Unity fucked up hard here and I hope that their planetary-level screw up will lead to game developers pushing for open source engines to avoid the control of their games being stolen.</text></comment>
<story><title>Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more open engines’</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/10/improbable-and-epic-games-establish-25m-fund-to-help-devs-move-to-more-open-engines-after-unity-debacle/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aphextron</author><text>&amp;gt;There should me more push for really open engines, as in FOSS. Unreal might be more open than Unity in some ways, but it&amp;#x27;s still not really open.&lt;p&gt;This just isn&amp;#x27;t possible with game engines. They are the single most advanced pieces of desktop software in existence. Sure, there are things like Godot that are perfectly suitable for a simple indie game. But making a AAA game engine requires the expertise of literally hundreds of top level senior engineers with advanced physics and mathematical knowledge. There&amp;#x27;s probably less than a few thousand people on earth with the level of skill and expertise to build something at the scale of UE4. Furthermore, open source is really the exception to the rule in game dev. Practically everything is done closed source with some kind of licensing fees involved. It&amp;#x27;s quite a different culture from web dev.</text></item><item><author>shmerl</author><text>There should me more push for really open engines, as in FOSS. Unreal might be more open than Unity in some ways, but it&amp;#x27;s still not really open.&lt;p&gt;And speaking of openness, didn&amp;#x27;t Epic push exclusivity approach recently in their store? That&amp;#x27;s bad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shmerl</author><text>Collaboration solves this. Instead of reinventing the wheel, collaborating on the engine can pool resources. This works in other cases, so why not with engines? It&amp;#x27;s not engines that are sold, but games. Having good open engine doesn&amp;#x27;t prevent developers from selling games made with them.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; There&amp;#x27;s probably less than a few thousand people on earth with the level of skill and expertise to build something at the scale of UE4.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s really bunk. I mean &amp;quot;only elite can do it&amp;quot; it claim. Sure, it&amp;#x27;s not something you can create in one day, but it&amp;#x27;s not something that out of reach either, especially when people are collaborating on it.</text></comment>