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Comment by tornadoboy55 | Hacker News Reader

Upwards to 70% of the XBOX360/PS3 generation AAA games ran on the Unreal Engine. For the XBONE/PS4 gen its 60% Unreal 30% Unity 10% stuff like CryEngine. It'd be very hard to knock Unreal off its throne since it's very, very well written and essentially free (you pay 5% of profits for commercial use when you go above a certain threshold). So no, there aren't any real openings for disruption unless Epic does something massively stupid.

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For AAA games, it's mostly in-house engines. Frostbite for EA games. Call of Duty games use the IW Engine. Bethesda uses either idTech or something geared for their RPGs.

Bethesda has been using the Gamebryo/Creation Engine for their RPGs (Fallout/Skyrim). I think Bethesda has only used idTech for Rage/Doom.

The Wolfenstein games and The Evil Within are both idTech as well.

They are too many to name. Check this[1] page for each gen. From gen 2 onwards, you'll be astounded.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

Look at the top-selling Xbox One games:

http://www.vgchartz.com/platform/68/xbox-one/

You have to go down to #31 to find an Unreal Engine game (Batman: Arkham Knight). The only licensed engine game that I know of in the top 30 is Titanfall, which licensed the Source engine from Valve. The situation is similar for the PS4.

#9 Gears of War: Ultimate Edition uses UE FYI

So, this is correct and I thank you for the correction. Having said that, I don't think that changes my point much if any -- there's one game in the top 30 sellers that uses Unreal Engine, and it didn't use it as a third-party engine -- Epic developed both UE and Gears of War.

By and large, the developers of AAA games don't license an engine from a third party.

Bethesda's subsidiary id uses idTech. Bethesda Game Studios (Elder Scrolls, Fallout) has used their Gamebryo/Creation engine for about 15 years.

So, as I've noted above, other studios besides id use idTech at Bethesda -- you could argue that MachineGames doing the Wolfenstein games is still an id property, but Tango used it for The Evil Within, too. And I did say "or something geared for their RPGs." I couldn't remember the name Creation Engine when I was posting on my phone at a Christmas gathering.

MachineGames and Tango are owned by ZeniMax[0], the Bethesda parent company. I faintly remember someone (Carmack, maybe?) mentioning that idTech5 would only be licensed to studios within ZeniMax.[1] Of course, anyone can use idTech up to 4, since those are open source, and were licensed out.

[0] https://www.zenimax.com/studios

[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/29886/id_Tech_5_Rage_Engi...

Yes, MachineGames and Tango are owned by ZeniMax. They are published by Bethesda Softworks, the parent company of Bethesda Game Studios and a ZeniMax subsidiary. I don't really understand the point of this faux pedantry, seeing as there is a meaning of Bethesda that fits my post.

That's assuming that all game engines are created equal.

I'll give you that Unreal and CryEngine are similar enough to make that comment, but there's plenty of space for innovation within engines. Amazon seems to be trying their hand at it with twitch integration for example.

In general, game development is filled with archaic processes, boilerplate, inefficient workflows etc. Unity3d was the jQuery of game development in that regard, and we're nowhere near peak.

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