• Poutinetown@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    6 months ago

    Honestly a private company like Valve should consider going into the game engine business. They could probably use the same monetization as epic (5% or free on steam) and it would be a breeze for them to integrate. However it might not make financial sense for them hence they have not done it yet.

    • force@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      Valve already has a game engine you can use – Source – although outside of their own games, it’s not really popular. Otherwise I think it’s moreso that making a good general gaming engine is hard. Like, really hard. If Valve tried to compete with, say, Unreal or Unity, (especially with their relatively small team) it’d more likely than not have no chance at all. They’d need a LOT more manpower, a massive budget, and to hope that they actually make something quality enough to actually be a viable alternative. Even then, though, it doesn’t have the 2 decades of content and design that Unreal and Unity have, which is pretty important. Although I suppose Source does have a lot of user-generated content.

      It’d be a gargantuan investment, a massive risk that has a high likelihood of not turning out well, and even if it were successful it would likely take many years if not over a decade to actually see the benefit of it.

      There’s a good reason most games use an extremely small amount of engines, either that or their own in-house engines. It’s a monumental task to make a great, easy-to-use, generic engine like the ones currently on the market.

      IMO Valve trying to enter the game engine market would just end up being either Godot but worse, or Bevy but worse. It’d be far better if they just created a team to work on a pre-existing open-source engine, although I guess there’s not any money involved in that unless they for some reason used the engine.

      • Poutinetown@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        6 months ago

        Do you think it would make sense for valve to donate money and effort to Godot vs improving source?

        • force@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          edit-2
          6 months ago

          Investing in Godot probably has no sizable benfefit to Valve. But it does have a big benefit for gaming as a whole, specifically smaller or newer developers/studios. Meanwhile investing more in Source 2 may have a lot of benefit for Valve, depending a lot on their future plans.

          • Altima NEO@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            6 months ago

            Yeah, the only reason source exists is because they needed an engine to cater to their own needs. Every time they update it, it’s because they needed it to do something.