More and more games seem to suck on thier own, but can be great with mods. You have entire platforms like roblox where all the games are more or less mods. How long until the platform itself is community created and managed and the viability of games created by companies dissappears?
Engines cost money for a reason. It means you get the tools while someone else spends the significant resources to develop and maintain it. There are FOSS engines available, but those aren’t as developed or widespread.
Exactly, but that is what I am pondering. How long until those engines get easy enough to maintain that they really take off. Software coding tools are starting to take off. If constrainable by verification test, those tools can do a lot. I don’t know what it takes to maintain a FOSS engine from experience, but I can imageing that a lot of the effort goes into supporting different hardware and OS changes. That is the kind of thing that software coding tools should be able to greatly reduce the effort of. Usually such engines have large quantities of tests for both functionality and performance verification. So you can set the tool to add support for a new peice of hardware, and instruct it to test both that and others, than iterate u til it gets it right. Right now, I think the costs for that are still too high. But the day is probably coming when those costs get low enough, and the coding tools good enough to greatly reduce the maintenance aspect of engines. Since that is the boring part of FOSS, that could drive an explosion in that area.