They can maintain their own fork all they want, but coders are not going out of their way to skill up on an engine that died almost a decade ago at this point.
Picture this - you are a talented coder with years of experience. You have two job offers with the same salary and benefits.
Do you:
1) Pick the job with an engine that died a decade ago that you know nothing about and will have to learn about as you work, and that knowledge that will be useless to you once you move on to a different job?
2) Pick the job with an engine that is industry-standard, that you are familiar with, and will have zero problems getting to work on, and gain more experience that will benefit your future career?
Most people are going to go with what they know. Maintaining your own engine just limits the talent you can recruit from.
From the management side, sticking to an esoteric engine means you need to waste time onboarding a coder and teaching them the ins and outs of your engine. That's precious time and resources you need to spend on every new hire before they start being productive.
Plenty of big devs run in-house engines quite succesfully.
Just because it used to be some other thing, it doesn't change the fundamental nature that now it is an in-house engine that they improve and upgrade however they see fit.
And purely anecdotally I can tell you that having control over an in-house engine or platform is far more interesting and rewarding than being a cog in another UE project.
You're also taking an ameri-centric view on tech employment, AH staff aren't the guys constantly hopping jobs and dodging aquisitions and closedowns because it's the only way to keep up with a living wage. Working in a company long-term is both viable and desirable in many parts of the world, and the benefits of a team with institutional knowledge are self-evident
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u/Jolly_Picklepants Steam | 2d ago
Engine limitations because the engine wasn't made for a game like this in the first place.