Taking a cursory glance through the solutions that already exist for this (which are largely standalone MMO style servers):

You lose out on many network troubleshooting tools unreal has built-in, as well as some of Unreal’s play-in-editor testing tools. Its also common to add roughly 1.25-2x netcode development time as you’re going to be coding things in on the Unreal client side as well as the server side.

I can see why this is feasible but rare to see in the wild. I think anything you pitch to an exec with a note that it may add 6 months to a year of extra development time (and QA time) is going to cause people to start swinging.

Edit: This comes off as negative and I don’t mean it to be - A lot of companies do their own Unreal engine tweaks and I could see if a company built it up, they could have something solid and easily reworkable for future projects.

I’m not a smart nor good developer so maybe I’m looking at this wrong, but if you’re a game Dev and you’re using Unreal Engine or Unity, aren’t you already bound to whatever license they have?

I believe if you’re following say Unreal’s structure, you’re using their server/client netcode, and while you can release whatever you’ve made you can’t use or share any of Epic’s code. That would still require users to agree to Epic’s EULA to get the full engine to compile your server setup.

Add in server handling for VoIP, audio middleware like FMOD, proprietary stuff like Xbox/PS crossplay, Steam’s SDK, etc and I feel like that’s a tangled web.

I’m also very tired and am probably not fully registering here.

I don’t know why but this doesn’t really read like ‘oh I just found this game’ and seems more like a straight up ad to me.

I don’t know why, but I feel like Capcom is just going to offer more DLC instead.

Hmm. On second thought, maybe games were a mistake.

The only recent example I can think of is Death Stranding.

There’s definitely weird people making games on itch and sometimes in the depths of Steam.

By its very definition weird isn’t going to sell to mass market. That being said I do agree that we need more weird AAA or AA games.

They kept rebalancing to chase the hardcore PvPers wants who ended up leaving anyways, started getting pushy with their microtransactions/battle pass (that were added in an update), and they added their Funcom launcher in an update.

Above all of that is there are still some ugly persistent bugs that have been huge problems for years now, many involving thralls which are pretty much required for late game content.

I won’t say Funcom did the worst job or anything that far, but they definitely put me in a ‘wait and see’ state for at least the first few major patches, as that will show what direction they want to take the game and who they’re focusing on for feedback.

This is a funky opinion, but I’m holding off on it because of how they handled Conan Exiles.

This isn’t surprising. WotC had been salivating for another hit like BG3. I suspect whoever they talk into making BG4 isn’t going to be able to clear the bar that Larian has set.