AAA is Switching to Unreal Because of DEI? | Cakez Reacts

[@YRVANDUK]

Jonathan Blow had a nice talk few years ago about how and why software quality degrades over time. New programmers are not learning to program, they just learn how to use and program a piece of software, therefore as time progresses there is less and less people who actually know how software works under the hood.

[@GameBoyyearsago]

Agree With you, we need more John Carmack and we neef more Engines like Id Tech And Cry Engine with Amazing Art Style Graphics than photo realism : )

[@ferinzz]

Just recently saw a talk about what it takes to be a graphics dev. A master in mathematics. I don't know how many times that was said. If that's what it would take, I'm not surprised the overlap of game dev and competent programers is diminishing.

[@YRVANDUK]

@@ferinzz I've been doing graphics programming for past 20 years. It sounds complicated, but in reality math required is basically just vectors and matrices multiplied together, what makes programming in this field difficult is insane complexity of graphic APIs.

[@ferinzz]

@@YRVANDUK Currently using Ralib because getting through the triangle tutorial for Vulkan took a week of off and on work. (Do not regret it though) After experiencing the amount of boilerplate code involved I can believe the API is the hardest/most annoying part of the job.

[@HugoIsThatGuy]

@@ferinzz Yeah, a lot of people tend to forget that most things in code used to be a lot simpler (in some ways) i used to write engines in my spare time, but its a lot of work to get something going. Changing in house engines to do what Unreal/Unity can do with graphics out of the box is just not maintanable

[@jokerpb4778]

I don't think it's because of DEI. People get old, they retire, they die and new people replacing them will not have any resource to learn from. So, switching to an engine that is very popular and already known by the most people in the industry is reasonable. This is the case with the big game companies imo. On the other hand, I think monopolization is bad for the industry and technology advancement in general.

[@YRVANDUK]

Also when large game studios hire people, they hire people who have some sort of educational degree in game programming and most education on this subject highly prioritizes engines such as unity or UE in their curriculum.

[@kotokotfgcscrub]

This and requirements for a new engine include all the progress made through years, same as creating new OS and browser.

[@zibasPk]

Honestly the fact that since there is starting to be a generational change, mantaining a inhouse engine becomes too expensive makes complete sense. Going on the attack on DEI is a bit shortsighted tho, yes it is annoying in games when they do it without tact, but extending it to the sole reason why old developers leave companies is honestly stretching it a bit too far.

[@HugoIsThatGuy]

Yeah, People just trickle away. Because companies tend to grow or try to stay the same size young people come in. At some point you have to either choose to have people use your own (not really maintainable) engine, or use something standardized where they come in and can use the tools already.

[@SnakeEngine]

And why is it different with UE then? When the old UE engineers leave, who is training them to keep the engine alive?

[@Cakez77]

Unreal is open while an in-house engine is closed to the public

[@rohitaug]

Threat Interactive has made a bunch of videos on why you might not want to use UE5 for a game

[@lennysmileyface]

You can still modify UE5. CDPR literally has a presentation about how they refactored the rendering thread in UE5.

[@ew2430]

Yes but these people don’t care about that, they’re pushing an agenda.

[@mrxcs]

Yes, they'll basically make their own engine on top of Unreal Engine.

[@NameUserOf]

They had help from Epic, and tge themselves aren't small company. Most people won't have such luxury.

[@lennysmileyface]

@@NameUserOf The video is about AAA.

[@lvmlvm1729]

Remember SEGA's slogan "We do what Nintendon't"? Nintendo decided on a brand policy and they don't allow certain types of games on their consoles. This policy started as far back as 16 bit generation (maybe before, not sure), and it is still in play today. They decided, long before woke culture was a thing, that having variety of games was not what their business needed, and instead they should promote a specific "family friendly" image. And lets face it: it worked for them. They didn't exactly go bankrupt or anything. So yes - it is more than feasible that if Unreal engine get monopolistic power they will start controlling what kind of games can and can not be made using their engine. There are plenty of real world reasons for them to do this, be it publicity, branding, or just personal views of top level management.

[@MrA6060]

I don't think DEI is intended here as something in-game, but actually irl. More and more companies are "pressured" by the public (in reality a small vocal minority of extreme left leaning) to have a diverse team of engineers, because those people aren't very bright and are convinced that people's opinions and ideas and whatever are mandated solely by their skin color, instead of life experiences and culture. So basically what will slowly happen is that studios and companies won't have the BEST engineers anymore but the MOST DIVERSE team of engineers, which sometimes might be the same but i bet most times it's actually not the same. For an example let's say you have to hire 2 engineeres from a list of 10 people, the list is ranked from best to worst performing. Naturally what anyone with a brain would do is hire the first 2, since they are the best, but with DEI and shit they first have to take a look at their current team, then hire 2 people based on what they need to fill the DEI quota which, again, could be the first 2, could be the last two, could be any combination from best to worst performing. In the long run that's gonna be very bad for companies because it's impossible to think that in every list of any candidates the best ones are the ones that could also fill the DEI quota, so there's an inevitable drop in quality of engineers working in these companies. I will jump with joy the day we stop pretending identity politics is important and stop referring to people for their identities as the only and most important feature of a person, disregarding the actual important factors that make people human.

[@lucasmarciel1527]

Lmao

[@blarghblargh]

uhhh no. there's a hiring bar. there is a varied hiring bar, in that some roles are hired as junior and some are more senior. but there's still a hiring bar. this is true for nearly every company over 10 devs. pretending most people who are getting hired aren't competent is an argument with no proof. there are always some people who pass an interview who turn out not to be perfect. hiring a lot of great programmers is really hard, especially when your industry can't afford enough people and time to actually train up people, and not have to make people crunch and cause most of them to burn out. and some companies just don't have a ton of good programmers at them to begin with, or the company has a hard time attracting good talent for other reasons. but that has nothing to do with DEI. this is a made up problem, and people are buying into it for no real reason. and there are clear issues of money and time and ballooning workloads you aren't factoring in, that are obvious to anyone who actually works in the industry. if you haven't read the mythical man month, you shouldn't be having business conversations about AAA dev. and it's clear you haven't, or you would have brought up those points. you are tilting at windmills. and undereducated on this topic.

[@syriuszb8611]

If you want to recruit someone who is good in UE, you can send them a test to do in the UE, tell them to make simple game according to some directions and you will have a general idea of how good they are. If you want to test someone for internal engine position, you basically can just judge him by his resume. Maybe you could give them test in the language your engine is using, but it's only half of story here. You have to spend time to teach them rest. And for what? Can even a AAA studio make an engine better than UE5? For cost of using UE5? AAA maybe, but it becomes less viable with time I think, since with the age of internal engine rises, the tech debt rises, and you need more and more resources to just maintain it, let alone expand it with new features. And people who know this engine retire or change jobs so you get even more issues.

[@shoopoop21]

Try making anything in UE3 that wasn't really designed to be made on UE3. I am trying to my a starfighter game, and unreal is terrible, because none of the things I'm sacrificing by setting my game in empty space seem to help, and the entity limit is so small, its restricting my creativity already. The canned movement in UE5 is this slimy, unresponsive mess that I immediately recognize now. UE5 feels designed to make slop.

[@Nicholas-nu9jx]

As a unreal dev, it has so many issues and rekies to much on oop. Main job im forced to use it and windows. I been playing with odin and opengl and its very clean and straight forward.

[@lennysmileyface]

Yeah for my projects I don't use the actor components in the OOP way or use an ECS plugin instead.

[@Nicholas-nu9jx]

@lennysmileyface I make high performance code in c++ that is ecs like and use blueprints to interface with it. I dont use any components

[@freezingcicada6852]

I like Odin a lot. It really is simple and to the point. But I'm wondering about, what is ECS? From some Rust talks they speak about getting away from a block-y, list/array/table oriented structure? I personally like Odin CAUSE I can just do lists or arrays of structs. That isnt madness. Or if do think about breaking up structures, Its for the purpose of trying to wrangle the memory into chunks that are rational. Also more of a hobbyist

[@Nicholas-nu9jx]

@freezingcicada6852 I dont like ECS as it's mostly just overhead and to general purpose. If you just lay out your data cache friendly way with array, you pretty much have performance benefits of ecs without all its layers. It's better in my opinion to handcraft from ground up with simple solution for a particular problem and not have a ecs framework im locked into using.

[@isaacribeiro6823]

21:36 are you high on hopium?

[@KoltPenny]

Have you seen JBlow's latest screenshots of his game?

[@Cakez77]

No, since you can't post links here maybe on discord. Would be cool

[@hexiy_dev]

pretty stupid to say dei is the problem... exactly the takes i'd expect from a troll like that lmao

[@Gibon123_]

dark souls is the best game from software ok chill fake fanboi for wievers i dont buy this bulshido hype for this clunky Slasher. And CDprojekt be woke go broke. And yes pick UE5 u can make 2d games too dont worry and make tutorials :)

[@isaacribeiro6823]

cuphead was a 2d in a 3d engine right? and i know is not the only one

[@Cakez77]

🤣

[@darkwraithcovenantindustries]

CDPR went broke? Bro CP2077 is in the top 20 of the best selling PC games of all time. Witcher 3 is in the top 10 of the best selling games of all time, period.

[@jesusmora9379]

literal troll

[@Cakez77]

True

[@bonnymich]

i dont understand why this is a big deal anyway, ppl look so much at the details but the general picture for is this, its a better engine it seems and they were left behind so why not

[@NeytozINF]

What he said is very true. DEI is ruining game companies. I'm a professional game developer in Poland and I've seen studios becoming more woke and it's always followed by talented people leaving because they just don't want to deal with the toxic management. And naturally team's skill is dropping, old talents leaving, new people are often not skilled enough because they were hired based on other aspects than skill. CDPR is very woke right now and is discriminating men with its training programs that only accept women. Truth is that you don't have enough talented women to replace men in this field so you end up hiring less talented people. When I studied computer science we had like 8 women and 300 men on first year. Even though they are given more points during recruitment process, women are still massively less interested in programming than men. If you favor people based on their identity instead of skill then you end up with diverse team of weak developers and also you're racist and sexist which is ironic.

[@blarghblargh]

I am also a pro game dev in the US, and diverse hiring causes zero problems. there's ALWAYS still a skill bar. it's usually just dudes who can't manage their emotions and refuse to grow up who have a problem with it. people who tend to be little shits and throw temper tantrums whenever they think they're right, and yell at other devs. when they go, it's usually good riddance. they very rarely do nearly enough work for the company to compensate for the insanely childish behavior. they usually were just early hires who know way too much shit, and don't pass along nearly enough tribal knowledge. when they leave the company, it is often a short term hit to productivity. but it is often a long term win, because the company tends to get better at documenting their internal software and processes, after the painful process of having to regain that knowledge due to the people with the knowledge leaving. juniors start to ramp up better, and then new junior hires, who tend to be both cheaper and more willing to grind, are better equipped to actually get something useful done, much more quickly. I know because I used to be one of those people who talked shit about "diversity hires" (about 15 years ago). then I started interviewing people, and figured out exactly how much work and time it takes to get candidates that meet hiring bars to begin with. and ramping them up. it's hard, seemingly unproductive work. and there's never enough time. especially at game studios. the people complaining about this problem are rarely the ones doing the training or the hiring.

[@DonaldDuvall]

Sadly it is true, in some cases.

[@keygamedev]

CD PROJEKT modify UE for multi-thread and faster loading/unloading for better performance. kzbin.info/www/bejne/gJKml2WHotusZ5osi=BdJAa1GPQCMaLTOi Hi-Fi Rush Game Team modify UE for Toon Rendering kzbin.info/www/bejne/nZWlcnavfrR2qsUsi=l3cnvJJ0gr68_rw6 Those are good example case when we need to change the engine

[@GameBoyyearsago]

Still i Prefer Id Tech And Cry Engine : )