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’s a little simpler than that. The games that use this engine have poor sales and no one is even buying idTech. There isn’t any reason to keep them around when Microsoft is losing 64 cents on every dollar. They chopped every unprofitable studio and cast several to their own budgets. Presumably they are going to sell off the mediocre studios and IP.

Ok, so what has happened historically when we hold a tech stack constant for 10 years? Versioning proceeds, but everyone consolidates on a thing?

Python? => Data science. Sure, python is just importing the C tools that do the heavy lifting, but look me in the eye and tell me R, S, SAS, or SPSS won.

C? => I mean, everything? But what happened in the first 10 years? Proliferation of operating systems and linear algebra libraries?

So, generally, the grey beard talent consolidates their intellectual contributions and uplift everyone else. Is that true? -ish? Missing the mark?

Guys, I'm a knuckle-dragger, I genuinely don't know what I'm asking. What are the tech stacks that were held constant (by whatever factors) for a decade, and what came out of it?

Is this the decade where art directors takes over gaming?

This is correct. It is entirely possible for both the archetypal blood-sucking MBA and the pragmatic industry veteran to reach the same conclusion for different reasons.

The build vs. buy calculus in game dev has been steadily shifting over the past 15 years, and when CD Projekt Red announced they were adopting UE5 for their next Witcher game, the writing was on the wall.

That said, Id could make a bold "commoditize your complements" move and open-source the latest, now last, IdTech. What Godot is to Unity, IdTech could be to Unreal Engine.

As a former AAA dev, this is spot on. At the end of the day, games are a business. Margins are not attractive and competition is fierce as the barrier to game development has lowered with Steam: both are downward pressures on wages.

After entering games with naive expectations of the wild west of the 90s, I would recommend other programmers not enter the AAA space, if compensation and job security are concerns. Indie game development looks like great fun, but don't expect any low-latency programming.

I don’t think unreal engine games play and look as well as custom engine games. Like doom or cyberpunk. If you open cyberpunk without rtx etc. It really really looks good and also plays very well.

Also there is obviously a massive gap between how games look and what the hardware is capable of. Cyberpunk runs better than total war attila on my computer as an example.

Don’t write a database, don’t write a compiler, don’t write an os, don’t write a game engine… are we all supposed to write web apps at this point?

This mindset didn’t create what we have today and won’t create what we will have tomorrow. I recommend people that like building these things to ignore this pov as much as possible

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.

Both can be true.

Just because it's becoming more common doesn't mean it's not bad.

Man I miss tribes and tribes 2. Sadly the revival was garbage.