The gist: commercial game engines like Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot, GDevelop, etc. all make creating games easier, and this leads to market saturation… is there enough “skin” in the game for developers?
I hold the view that games ought to be a viable business, and companies like Epic, Unity Technologies, the Godot Foundation, and GDevelop Ltd. business model goes against that. Don’t get me wrong: this is not a negative thing. It is (mostly) in their best (economic) interest to operate like this, and it’s their prerogative.
From a moral standpoint it makes sense. Some rhetorical (for the purposes of this discussion) questions: Why shouldn’t it be easy to make games? Why should this be so hard? From another viewpoint: why should everyone be able create games and saturate the market for those more serious, with actual investment in the marketplace? Why should something arduous and difficult be made easier? In life arduous and difficult endeavors generally have significant reward…
More importantly: what can be done about this?
From a market supply vs demand perspective I argue the following: these game engine companies do a fantastic job making game development accessible and viable for just about anyone with a computer and a somewhat logical mind. This enables a gluttony of games put into the market. Platforms like Steam (and others) make publishing and distributing games very possible for game developers (that’s us). The vast supply of published works saturates not just the market but player’s time… there’s been factoids published showing how many gamers have a library of games they may never actually play, and some have argued this is due to available time constraints.
An analogy: like a restaurant selling hamburgers, where the burgers are so delicious and affordable that consumers actually can’t even shovel them into their faces fast enough [F(burgers) = burgers/time; ( Lim(burgers) → burgers^+ F(burgers) = +infinity ], and which no other restaurants can reasonably compete with. I believe this is an accurate (if not absurd !) analogy…
The result is the cheapening of the products on market due to said market saturation.
My answer to the questions above is thus: maybe the argument for game development as a business or just a hobby made easier could hold true but only works of merit. How? I think things could be fair for everyone if the level of investment required were raised… perhaps steam could raise the publishing cost. Perhaps Epic or Unity Tech could make their engines more expensive.
My supporting argument is: when game engines make games easy to create, and platforms like steam make them easy to publish, the level of effort necessary to make a business out of this endeavor becomes a great deal higher, and more so a gamble than anything. We have seen literal giants of industry fallen by market conditions. Publishers closing down studios when games don’t make a return on investment… developers out of work… multimillion dollar projects making a ROI an order of magnitude less…
These are my thoughts… what are yours? Please keep it respectful and civil.
