Changing the engine increases the cost of development. The developers were warned about this by the head of the Sproing studio, Dietmar Houser, during a speech at the GDC 2015 conference.
In the image: art for the game Silent Hunter Online, in the development of which Sproing participated
According to Hauser, the choice between buying an engine and creating your own is a choice between a one-time expense and investment.
It may seem that there is no difference. This is not the case, Hauser is sure. One-time spending (buying an engine) is money that you won’t see anymore. Investments (engine development) are money that you spend so that they will bring profit in the future.
In either case, if you changed the engine in the middle of the development process, you irretrievably lost the money invested.
Hauser also told what difficulties developers may face if they decide to buy an engine, rather than create one. The company that created the software can be bought by third parties. This happened, he noted, with the RenderWare engine from Criterion Games. In 2004, the studio was acquired by Electronic Arts. As a result of the deal, the rights to the engine were transferred to her. After that, only EA’s subsidiary studios could count on updates.
There is another difficulty associated with the purchase of the engine, Hauser noted. Due to updates, sometimes it is necessary to rewrite codes and redo assets.
In conclusion, Hauser added that changing the engine between two projects is also not the best idea. In this case, it will be necessary to re-train the team, he noted.
A source: http://www.develop-online.net
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