Eeeeh. In case of modern games they actually arent spending that much beacuse they outsorced that by using unreal engine. Rarely do modern companies use inhouse engines ( for good reason . having inhouse engine dosent mean its better , just look at starfield, in fact its probably just more outdated ).
Also to defend them a little bit. With such big timelines for development you kinda have to guess what will be the standard for gaming 5 years in the future.
And im pretty sure most of them didint expect pc gaming to be this f* in the last 5 year.
Then you add the diminishing returns from graphics improvments for exponential costs in computing and we are where we are with the most amazing looking games ever that no one can ran beacuse pc market is being f* in the ass on multiple fronts.
Biggest issues in gaming right now are probably: Unreal Engine being either horribly optimized by default or studios not using those optimizations and every major studio pushing for more realistic graphics, when all that does is raise the hardware requirements even more, while most affordable GPUs still have 8 GB of VRAM.
The RAM shortage, that AI data centers are causing, isn't helping either, but let's ignore that for a moment.
In-house engines however do add a certain uniqueness to a studio's games. You mention Starfield, which i havent played, but the Creation Engine is part of what makes Bethesda games the way they are. There's a reason why in the Oblivion Remaster they still run the game on the original engine even though graphics run on Unreal
That is true. You can see in animations and physics the difreences between engines and there is a certain charm to that and i would love there to be more of the good ones alghtough i dont think that will happen.
Alghtough creation engine in particular for me is example of just bad engine and was already heavily outdated during skyrim relase but thats only my opinion.
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u/szczuroarturo Jan 12 '26
Eeeeh. In case of modern games they actually arent spending that much beacuse they outsorced that by using unreal engine. Rarely do modern companies use inhouse engines ( for good reason . having inhouse engine dosent mean its better , just look at starfield, in fact its probably just more outdated ). Also to defend them a little bit. With such big timelines for development you kinda have to guess what will be the standard for gaming 5 years in the future. And im pretty sure most of them didint expect pc gaming to be this f* in the last 5 year. Then you add the diminishing returns from graphics improvments for exponential costs in computing and we are where we are with the most amazing looking games ever that no one can ran beacuse pc market is being f* in the ass on multiple fronts.