IO Interactive's mission to speed up game development. The Hitman developer discusses the advantages of running its own tech and how it's looking to make games 'cheaper, faster and better'.

One of the things I really hope they learn how to do is launch their games in a straightforward manner. Hitman is a great game but trying to figure out how to just buy the damn thing is so unnecessarily complicated. Someone on reddit made a chart about it and I still don't understand what I'm supposed to buy on Steam.

Cheaper, faster, better.... Pick 2

"One of the biggest things with Unity and Unreal is that they're constantly trying to grow. And to grow means they're constantly adding new features because they want to add more user types. That ends in a polluted engine in terms of features. If you go to the bar at the top, you will see a lot of features and they have so many use cases. And now they're also building for industrial digitisation, so they need to support that. So suddenly you have this large code, and maybe somebody is only using just 40% or 30% of it, but you need to make sure it's stable and doesn't crash.

Yes. But on the flip side, you also have a lot more resources to debug that codebase.

I think that there's a fair argument that Unity or Unreal might not be ideal for a given game. But:

• I am skeptical that game studios are generally better-off writing their own engine, particularly with graphically-spiffier games.
• I think that the main case where doing one's own engine is useful is when someone wants to do something that a game engine simply cannot do. I don't think that just having one game studio implement 30%-40% of a shared engine from scratch with the goal of having a codebase that's 30%-40% the current size makes a lot of sense in terms of saving development time. And even if new functionality is required, I'd still argue that if that functionality is at all reusable, it'd be a good idea into looking into spreading those costs over a number of games.

It's not the engines' fault that game development got longer. It's that most AAA games over scope and go open world when they don't have to, which not only takes longer to make but often results in a worse game. Make games smaller and iterate on them quickly, like the industry did 20 years ago. That's how you make this make sense.

I have my doubts, but I'd like to be surprised. Most works can be only two of: cheap, fast and/or good.