this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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If you have the talent and manpower to create your own engine, it’s better business to make that engine your product instead of whatever game you wanted to make.
I disagree here, making an engine you'd sell must be top notch in every aspect (or close to), an in-house engine only needs to get the job done for your game. Probably two orders of magnitude in needed workforce, depending on your needs ofc.
Very very few actual profitable companies roll their own engines.
Supercell has their own, but it’s because they started before there was anything available.
Indie games make their own engines but it’s more of a hobby or passion project, not something that can employ two dozen people to develop it.
From Software and Hideo Kojima would disagree. The highest form of passion for your game is to create an engine that gives it the exact gameplay formula you want it to have.
Of course corporate greedfucks cannot understand this, they only care about how many villas and yachts the profits will get them.
It’s not really that great of a business.
Epic is estimated to have made $275M revenue on Unreal engine in 2023, vs $4.7B on Fortnite
Unity made $614M revenue on engine & tools in 2024, in ads and monetization they made $1.2B
These are stable industry standard engines, if you start work on your challenging engine today it’ll take years to develop, gain game-developers interest and trust. And still you’re competing with giants that use their engines as loss-leaders.
The advantage of making your own engine is that you can specialize for your specific gameplay.
If your game is something that needs it, definitely go for it.
Something like Noita comes to mind
Then you only get a big geneal use thing like Unity again.