A few mid-size studios pitching in to fund continued development on a Blender model could turn IdTech into a major competitor to Unreal Engine in a relatively short timeframe, ultimately costing them a lot less than licensing.
Doesn't Microsoft want fewer, bigger games locked into their Project Helix platform? Why compete with Unreal when they can sign a sweet license for the engine?
Why build an ecosystem when they are already a huge monopoly?
So on the test you'd get questions such as
python:snake :: ___ : ___
a) lua:satellite
b) swift:bird
c) java:coffee
d) pearl:gem
A swift is a type of bird, so that would follow the same logic as the example;
ProgrammingLang:Animal
Godot and Unity can be dealt with by a small studio (or even 1 person), Godot and Id get much better performance than Unity and Unreal
Next you need to make a product out of that meaning a very large investment so that the engine is actually usable outside of ID, people that don't know what an engine is think of the rendering part but it's actually very minor compare to pipelines ect ... which we know nothing about, it might not even be good or painful to use.
Unreal is widely used because it can create any kind of game and the pipeline, tooling are good and well integrated.
I hear a lot of good things about modern idTech. Pervasive multithreading is one, and it's not particular to the FPS genre.
3D Engines of that fidelity are rarely genre specific. Editors might be but the engines are often fairly flexible because most genres share a lot in 3D space.
And the engine is way more complicated nowadays — UE at least has a huge community and docs.
I’m just an old man who prefers a much, much slower pace for the rendering engine. I wouldn’t mind that they grew so slow that we just got IDTech 4.
Doom runs like butter on the switch.
Might be hard to run, I don't know, but at least it was well made.
But for what its worth, the graphics were nice. This however, was on a 4090.
Arc Raiders runs phebomenal.
The engine is great. If games run terrible it's on the devs. Full stop.
They also make money through ad services... a market they seriously missed out on (look at AppLovin stock vs Unity).
Asset sales are barely a blip.
Unreal makes the vast majority of it's revenue through microtransactions on its one major whale game Fortnite
The last non-Id release on IdTech was Brink in 2011.
Microsoft's game divisions make money through making games, so opening up the engine itself would've been conducive to their goals (cultivating an ecosystem of devs and even contractors familiar with the tooling).
idTech rendering is more competitive with Epic's Unreal technology than Unity and Godot.
They should simply open source it if they fire the devs. Else the engine and future support for the games built on it are essentially being tossed into the trash.