> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel.

I think this is a bit of a myth. Unreal gets this criticism a lot, but it's usually because many studios choose to stick close to the rendering defaults, which does lead to a certain look.

To that point, it's probably a lot cheaper to configure Unreal or Unity into a unique "grain" than it is to develop your own engine. It's also possible to use custom physics instead of those built into the engine.

Yeah but afair UE5 Nanite + Lumen + Megalights + whatever is meant to work together, you can't just replace or turn off one of them without it affecting the others.

So your choices are to tweak the defaults (which are not bad, but generic and the same as everybody else's), or rebuild the whole renderer (like ARC raiders did for example)

Also, studios with their own engine may release one or two fresh-feeling games, but across repeated releases, a custom engine is going to become strangling and repetitive way faster than any off-the-shelf option.

So it’s a myth but there’s a good reason to believe it happens?