>Truth is, it’s not that 90s anymore. Hardware has advanced to the point that you can have general purpose game engines that can be molded to any type of game. You do not need purpose built engines anymore.

I disagree, I think there's an over-emphasis on generating high quality individual frames and a expectation of what it is you should be able to do in games.

You can have a game that is photorealistic but you turn around and have your gun barrel poke into the wall and disappear. How many games can you throw enough junk into a river and make it change course eroding a new path for itself as it goes?

Some games rely on clear specific rules of an engine for the player to know because the rules are an integral part of the game, and any inconsistency in implementation creates a feeling of being cheated. Often you can implement such things in standard engines, but you are working against them the entire way.

You could have a game where a player sees a pylon and knows that because it is made of metal you could melt one of the legs and make it fall over. but to do that the entire construction of the game rules are integrated into the world. Most games teach the player that things like pylons are static objects unless they need to be destroyed for a plot point in which case just this one is different. Perhaps the player just has to learn that pylons are one of the class of destroyable things. Making emergent properties goes engine deep.

>And someday, if you can imagine, we’ll just have AI churning out visual representation of game state, turning game development purely into a declarative data driven exercise.

And therein lies the problem. A game engine is game state. You can make it pretty any number of ways, The engine will still be the thing deciding what you can do, and it is the things you can do that makes it play.