There’s unreal engine, fox engine, enfusion engine, Frost Bite just to name a few off the top of my head. What makes them different? Why can’t there be a single unifying engine?
I understand the part about licensing and costs, but beyond that is there really any difference and if so, what is it?
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A lot of innovation in 3d engines generally comes from throwing everything out and starting again with a different approach. You can only keep iterating on any one game engine design before it becomes an evolutionary dead end. If every company used the same game engine, then the end result would be that every game is exactly the same, because there would be no impetus to try and push for any outstanding innovation. In fact, the desire to make something that no one has seen before is usually what is responsible for creating new game engines.
Of course, once any new innovation happens, it is generally imitated or replicated by competing engines not long after, but it has to take someone to demonstrate it is possible to begin with.
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