this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2026
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At a conceptual level, it makes 100% sense that companies are moving away from bespoke engines and towards a standardized engine. This is something you see in many different industries. Spending a whole bunch of money and effort when 95% of your requirements are the same as everyone else is a bit silly.
However, you're completely right that there's the same danger as in other industries where the 'boring software infrastructure' gets standardized and outsourced: a niche monopoly able to exploit their position. What tends to happen in the long run is an open source project for that infrastructure run by an NGO with the industry members (in this case AAA game companies) on the board of directors.
Even disregarding the long-term problems, I fear for the days when every single game looks the same because their developers decide that UE5 knows best and that there's no way photorealism gets in the way of artistic direction
... hell, even in stylized UE5 games, I don't know how or why but I can feel the UE5ness
A lot of these developers would be better off in the long run working in Godot and submitting PR's for fixes and updates that they need
So, O3D, basically. Formerly basically Lumberyard, one of the branches of CryEngine, that Amazon bought, then gave up on actually making work, then open sourced it, but still basically runs the NGO/NonProfit that technically runs it.
As opposed to the other branch that StarCitizen/RSI is... "developing"... or just the main branch that CryTek still owns and does liscense out.
But yeah we still currently have Godot that is opensource and run by an NGO/NonProfit that at least currently doesnt seem to be totally dominated by corpo spending/influence.
And it only makes conceptual sense to adopt a 3rd party AAA engine as an industry standard if youre financially fucked as a publisher/game studio. Its basically the same thing as a company being bought out by private equity; the only thing that can happen from that point is squeezing the last bit of juice out of whatever is left.
Because when there's a monopolistic game engine, well it just colludes with monopolistic hardware.
Then nobody in the bottom 90% can afford the 'AAA' experience, because prices are too high, because the engine doesn't need to be optimized, because that would decrease monopolistic rents on the hardware, which also doesn't need to be optimized.
So that market and production model cannibalizes itself.