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Even licensing this technology leaves a lot of work to be done.


I would even take this further, and say that most of the work is in the assets and not the engine, whether you license or not.

FireFox's idea of using existing middleware to bring down development costs is not a new one. As you said, it's been in the industry for many years already. For your typical game, whether you're using an existing game engine or you're coding it from scratch, you still need about the same number of programmers working on it. What the pre-bought engine saves you is ramp-up time, allowing you to get assets in place and start playtesting that much quicker.

I've been thinking about this a bit, and this is where the difference between the music industry and the game industry is the greatest... A single musician or a very small group of artists, either with no help or the help of a very minimal production team, can make Sergeant Pepper or The Joshua Tree. While this was also true of games many years ago, it's not any more, thanks to the incredibly powerful realtime graphics of the latest PCs and consoles. Now, making a game is much more akin to making a hollywood movie, and you've seen the budgets and the production credits for those.

The only place where making games is still like making records today is on handheld devices, where the small screen means fewer artists are needed. And interestingly, the direct-to-consumer model already exists in that industry, on cell phones.
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Tony Fabris