I think you're spot on, and the results are demonstrating how that doesn't work at all.

Corporate so desperately wants art to be a science, and it's falling flat on its face over and over in doing so.

Written like somebody who's worked in PE, or at least has seen what they do.

Spot on.

There would have to be a blanket nationwide video game developer union, regardless of the employer.

Unfortunately that goes for 99% of once successful studios now. Delightful turn of phrase though.

what has happened to one of the greatest game studios of all time.

Microslop hoovering up all the development studios. That's what happened

The Wolfenstein 3-D era logo was in all caps. Maybe OP is nostalgic.

I think that Unreal's real advantage is its ubiquity - all the tools that you might want to use for game creation, from mocap to modelling, with with it; and there's a near-endless supply of programmers and artists that know how to use it. The licensing is just a bonus. idTech is infamous for its bad tool support; Raven software basically needed a whole pile of direct contacts in id in order to develop games on that engine. But yes - Unreal 5 basically means that you'll struggle to hold 30 fps even with framegen and upscaling, whereas idTech is silky smooth and efficient.

Carmack was at his best working near-solo, solving some tricky optimisation problem and getting Mike Abrash to tweak up the resulting assembly. Some of the comments that came out of Meta suggest to me that he finds large teams frustrating and stilting. Can't blame him there, really. Am not sure he's the man for modern AAAA+ gaming, with huge teams and massive pipelines. Besides, he's more interested in messing about with AGI now; best leave him to that.

id was fractious and wracked by strife even when it was tiny any young. It worked at a time when technical proficiency and innovation was enough to amaze, enough to make a game company viable. There's no reason to suspect that Carmack is or was any kind of business visionary or talented manager.

"Unreal performance is utterly abysmal these days"

Looks at Carmack's Doom running at a REALLY impressive 20fps at 320x200

Lest we forget, Carmack enabled Meta to jumpstart their bullshit VR/spayware headsets. He could have been a hero for gamers, but we know that $$$ is king.

I wish moves would stop using Unreal, they all look like shitty video games now with weird video games physics.

It's not abysmal for what it does. They've just added a few features that require a lot of computation when turned on, and every idiot studio and idiot gamer turns them on and goes, "ugh performance is so crap now".

The lack of optimization is a problem, but it's not nearly as big of an impact as expensive features like ray tracing and ultra-high detail assets that still look crisp at 4k.

Unreal's non-free, so 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮

(I mean both as in freedom and as in free beer)

calculated slop

That's a great way to call it

I guess you know better than the guy working there

I mean. For Id that era ended a while ago. And a few times.