Why Build Your Own Game Engine? The Data Says It Still Pays
What You Gain by Building Your Own Game Engine
Despite the dominance of Unity and Unreal, custom engines still power 43% of game sales. This post argues that building your own engine—even a game-specific one—offers deep learning and independence. The author shares examples from his own games and teaching, showing how understanding engine internals like cascaded shadow maps and occlusion culling leads to better optimization decisions.
You think you can just make something better than Unity or Unreal (or Godot or GameMaker) in general. You can’t. It’s possible to make something that is better than these for specific use cases […], but you, as an individual or a tiny team, are not going to compete with these for general purpose stuff.