> Stretching $8 million to do $2 BILLION of product development is the hard part.
It's even worse over in Rust land. Bevy is making progress, but it's slow.
There are several parts to this. There are the run-time components - the graphics stack, the physics engine, and the 2D user interface components are the big ones. There's the gameplay programming system - schematics in Unreal Engine, scripts for most others. Then there's a developer user interface to provide a GUI for all this.
Open source development can do the run-time components. There's general agreement on how those are supposed to work, and many examples to look at. The developer user interface is tough. Open source development has a terrible time with graphical user interfaces. Those need serious design, not just a collection of features and menus that happen to compile together.
There are indies doing well certainly (had at least 3 significant hits this year to my knowledge between Balataro (made with LOVE2D), Animal Well (C and a custom engine) and Buckshot Roulette (made with Godot)), but game developers in general have not been doing great. Seeing layoffs on par with the rest of tech.
We've had upwards of 20k games industry layoffs in just the last couple years, iirc. Funding has dried up too, which is really bad for indies since they're more dependent on it than established studios.
Its more that there's an absence of investment funding. Profits are still being made and work is still being done but its hard to get a new project funded, let alone allocate that funding to engine dev.
So is trying to make a game engine during the worst industry contraction since the collapse of Atari.
Being open source is kind of saving them right now.