I’ve been working in the games industry as a programmer for 21 years and I’ve seen this so many times. I also used to see it on gamedev.net and flipcode.com. Very technical people, engine programmers, think they can make a game and seem to think that all it takes is an engine and don’t even think about the game part. They tinker endlessly with file formats, memory allocators, vector math libraries, pooled string classes, etc and never finish anything when they could have just used json and png files and actually shipped something. On PC for the scale of game most indie developers will make all of that stuff isn’t really necessary. And if you find it is necessary then you can refactor later.

A few months ago he posted a video where he realized his motivation behind the curse of the Eternal Enginedev: "I thought if I could just make a really good engine, making a game would be the easy part."

Edit: Found it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kzNiMMnT4U

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I had a related realization recently... I realized I had taken my "prototyping mindset" into a production project, and that was a very bad idea. (Wasted an enormous amount of time, could have finished way sooner.)

So, first of all, I need an outlet for creative and experimental stuff (R&D Division), to get it out of my system! And second, the production project isn't the right place for that. (At least, not on the level of tech and infra.)

I think that's basically what John Cleese was getting at with the Open/Closed Mode thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g

For many people sure. There is also the path of “just build a game” with no distinction between the game and the engine. Super Mario 64 doesn’t have a game engine. For the first few months it was just “catch the bunny”.

> the engine limits the kinds of games that are thinkable.

Does anyone actually do that? Most people just sit around thinking things up, and only later are they sobered to the fact of how much work it would be to implement a niche feature that isn't a substantial part of the game.

> Which is why so many games look and play exactly the same.

I'd argue that 90% of that is caused by default shaders. It's why people complain about "unreal engine sheen" it's how most of the materials get set up for you if you don't care to change it. The other 9% is default character controllers for the same reasons. 1% or less is going to be caused by some unalienable quirk of the engine that can never change.

> Steam success is somewhat correlated with making your own engine. Novelty and standing out from the crowd are the things that sell your game.

Successful games often have novelty and stand out. But there's an aspect of survivor bias. Probably plenty of games that are novel or stand out in all the wrong ways. It's also not clear that making your own engine causes novelty or you to stand out.

> It's a lot harder to do new things if what you can think is limited by your infrastructure.

Again, not convinced that's the way people go. Maybe they try to implement it and it's clunky, or doesn't scale, or trashes performance. So they scale it back, rework it, or write some custom code. An engine isn't magic, any amount of code you have to write to implement a feature is less than a whole new engine. Would Balatro have been a better game if it had a completely bespoke rendering pipeline? I'd say probably not.

> the engine limits the kinds of games that are thinkable. [...] You probably don't even realize the thousands of little decisions that are forced on you

Well, if Im not aware of those decisions forced upon me. I doubt they are affecting what I think is possible to do in the engine, as I'm not aware of the limitations in the first place.

Framework, Bevy is definitely not an engine.

Does it do one thing? It's probably a library.

Is it a collection of libraries that work together focusing on primitives with callbacks? It's probably a framework.

Does it load levels? Have its own schema for an entity? Provide a multiplayer server protocol, and build on primitives? It's probably an engine.

Libraries -> frameworks -> engines -> games.

Yes but to be fair the vast majority of custom game engines I've seen never even as far as to have a single working game written with them, even by the author. Having a game engine and a "demo" is an accomplishment in and of itself.

Yes a custom engine gives the game a unique look and feel, but it's also expensive. In fact, if Cyberpunk 2077 had used an off the shelf engine, it probably wouldn't have had such a buggy launch.

The Bethesda Morrowind-onward RPGs had their engine roots in Gamebyro, which was fairly widely used by other developers as well. That said I think there's a question about where the value comes from, as their customization to it 25+ years ago and what it enables their game/toolkit to do has clearly given them a 'special sauce' that hasn't been replicated.

Also upthread Source was mentioned which has id's Quakeworld/Q2 engine as an ancestor, via HL1 GoldSrc.

From the source: 'Vast majority of “other” engines are custom game engines'. They don't justify that claim. They just assert other ~= custom.

These categories add up to 100%. Where do the engines that are not "custom" (e.g. by the developer who made the game), or the major ones listed fit in?

There is a valuable point in what you are saying, but I don't think it is as strong as you are making it. Game engines do have a certain 'style' that is recognizable, especially if you use default settings and cookie cutter stuff from the asset store. The most successful indie games often have their own unique aesthetic, and rolling their own game engine, while not strictly necessary, does make that uniqueness the default outcome rather than something you have to strive hard to achieve.

But most indie games do not roll their own engine. Even this widely shared post aiming to show off games with custom engines, ends up listing a ton of games with notes like "OGRE-based" or "MonoGame-based." I'm sorry, but that's not a custom engine. That's an atypical engine choice (OGRE or MonoGame) with tweaks. Maybe I'm being a pedant, but I think the difference matters.

https://gist.github.com/raysan5/909dc6cf33ed40223eb0dfe625c0...

Unfortunately I don't think there are good numbers on how many truly original / custom / no-engine games are out there, in absolute or market terms. 13% is the ceiling, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was much smaller (e.g. <5%).

It really depends on your needs I guess. Not to undermine them in any fashion but If you just need some generic features and get something out quick, a pre-built engine can take a lot of the head ache out of it. I'm thinking stuff like last years 'Skate Story', built by one guy over a few years and it looks great, all done in Unity. If they were building their own engine it probably would still be another few years back and probably for not much gain.

But then things like Fez as you mentioned, back in 2012 when it came out, it would have been a real struggle to put together with off the shelf engines. I could see it being much easier now but still a product of its time.

One studio I am endlessly impressed with is Enhance games. Tetris Effect (UE4),Rez Infinite (UE4), Humanity (Unity) and Lumines Arise (Unity). When you fire them up, you would be really hard pressed to know what engine they are running as they have made the end results so unique that the base engines traits are almost completely gone. That is a real talent.

But if you have some unique tech that just needs to see the light of day or a work p=flow that just doesn't fit what everyone else is providing, go with your own engine. There will never be a one size fits all.

Isn't this survivorship bias? How many were successful in contrast that just used an off the shelf engine?

Regarding Source, Unreal, etc, that was back in the day when making an engine was much easier than today, due to lower player and graphics demands, which they then iterated on.

Factorio is a good example of a game that probably wouldn't exist in the form that it does without a custom engine.

I have a whole theory on this I call design innovation through technical innovation.

If you want to do something no one has done artistically, it helps if you're also doing something no one has done technically.

And novel designs stand out. It's no coincidence how many of those wildly successful games introduce totally new game designs, only made possible through their totally new game engines.

A lot of those games definitely get some of their unique game feel from their engine, but The Witness in particular is a type of game that really wouldn't need it in 2026. It's a product of both it's time and it's creator's unique strong feelings for programming languages, game engines, and game development.

Source is based on the Quake engine. A lot of those AAA games you're thinking probably are.

Well, to be pedantic, Stardew Valley + others used MonoGame which is technically a framework but realistically does a huge amount of the work needed to develop a game engine.

> Except a ton of successful indie games, including some of the best of all time

True. A lot of successful indie games are built in a custom engine. But that doesn't imply that all successful indie games need to be built on a custom engine or that someone is going to have more success by going the custom engine route.

The best of all time is a bar quite high. Success is already a few rungs down the ladder.