This title is so specific that I kind of think it was the reason…
I think it was kind of the reason. But that statement is also correct. Technically.
With CP2077, they were pushing the Red Engine well beyond what it was supposed to do. Which lead to both, them deciding to switch to Unreal, and causing a bunch of bugs. So the bugs weren’t the reason; They were just another result of the reason.It might be the part of it, but other (maybe main) reason is probably the fact that they had significant crunch culture going and high turnover. They supposedly had trouble recruiting at some point due to running out of interested game dev programmers in Poland. And why take months to train recruits to use your in-house engine, that also requires a lot of work and resources to maintain, when you can use one everyone knows and do simple onboarding.
That’s just semantics.
I agree. The reason was that it’s cheaper and easier and lets them have less people on the payroll. No more having to pay people to build/upgrade/maintain their in house engine. Now they just lease it from Epic. Ez savings. That’s why every fucking new game these days is the staggering pile of dogshit that is UE5 (noting that the reason for this is likely that devs just dont know how to use the engine properly, not necessarily that the engine itself sucks)
But the engine is shit. Threat Interactive on YouTube have done some awesome rendering analysis on UE5 games and engine features which I highly recommend to watch. But it’s the industry standard now in AAA space, sadly, for exactly the reason you mentioned.
And the games that are using it are not the games Epic built the engine for - they’re not Fortnite clones.
They still have senior devs that haven’t rotated out?