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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The absolute simplest version of this is to think of a game engine like a car (or vehicle).
If you make a race car, it might be great at going fast, but it might not be good at going offroad. An offroad vehicle might not be good at hauling a trailer full of goods across a continent (or might not be efficient at doing so) whereas a truck might be – but it it’s not going to win a race (and so on).
Game engines all have strengths and weaknesses, often borne from specialising at one particular thing or another. Some game engines simply weren’t designed to do certain tasks (like big worlds) but excel at others (graphical fidelity).
A lot of what makes game engines different comes from the needs of the designers and the intended use case – and just like designing a car that could go anywhere, it’s difficult/costly to make a game engine that can do everything, because certain design choices can prevent/hinder other uses.
Making a “do everything” engine is time consuming and costly – and the target “do everything” is a constantly updating goal, as technology/fidelity changes and improves.
Unreal is a good example of a “does mostly everything pretty well” engine – but if you look under the hood of a lot of high profile games that use it, it’s still been modified to some degree for that specific title/production environment.
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