alt Hacker NewsMicrosoft, one the world's greatest monopolists, bequeaths a game engine monopoly unto Epic Games, in one the biggest corporate blunders of all time.
If they were smarter about this, they would commoditize their compliment and open source the Doom The Dark Ages engine just like John Carmack did with the Quake 3 engine.
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I think they should have moved Halo onto it instead of Unreal.
However, is it easy to work with an undocumented IDtech engine? Even a previous generation, say Rage? I think it’s very hard.
The industry is skewing heavily indie now, and there's no money in the indie game engine segment. Maybe a few AAA titles will be unhappy that Epic can negotiate more aggressively, but mostly this is a nothingburger, particularly given idTech's rep for batteries not included.
What monopoly did they gift? IdTech hasn't been licensed to external companies in over 15 years, and several major versions ago.
The last non-Id release on IdTech was Brink in 2011.
Yes. As I suggested in another thread: an open-source, modern IdTech would fill the empty quadrant in the Godot : Unity :: ____ : Unreal matrix.
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.