Realistically - how locked in are developers to their current engine?
I imagine >50% of video game development is art. And I imagine some decent percentage of code can be translated without nearly as much effort as the original implementation.
Still, I doubt many developers are going to switch engines mid or late development.
But a lot of times, developers re-use much from their old games in development of their new games.
Is this realistically going to hold developers back from moving future development to a new engine?
I think you’re grossly trivializing the effort needed.
Let’s take art as an example. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s targeted to explicit engine behaviour. It’s symbiotic with the code. You can’t just go from Unity’s universal pipeline to Unreals.
And code is even harder. Forget language choice for a second, but logic itself is very tied to the engine. Unity’s monobehaviour architecture is very different to how one would write it in Unreal or Godot. That’s not even getting into engine specific optimization.
what might be fast in one render pipeline will be slow in another. Scheduling is different.
Also many developers rely on third party tools that aren’t engine agnostic either.
I work for a hedgehog based studio for their supposedly non existent mobile games arm albeit I don't work in engineering.
For us, it's a huge deal. It's that people have spent the best part of a decade working with Unity, their support and enterprise training is very good. Also we have a game out in December which is also Unity based.
As of yet we haven't made a decision on what to do but legal are looking at it, so, it's business as usual for now.
I imagine >50% of video game development is art. And I imagine some decent percentage of code can be translated without nearly as much effort as the original implementation.
Still, I doubt many developers are going to switch engines mid or late development.
But a lot of times, developers re-use much from their old games in development of their new games.
Is this realistically going to hold developers back from moving future development to a new engine?