“It’s Not the Engine’s Fault, It’s the State of the Industry” – Eternal Darkness Creator Defends UE5, Says Embracer’s $2B Failed Deal Was “Extinction Level Event”

Eternal Darkness and Legacy of Kain creator Denis Dyack shared a lot of interesting thoughts in a two-hour-long interview with KiwiTalkz, in which he addressed the lack of optimization of many Unreal Engine 5 games. You might remember that his upcoming game, Deadhaus Sonata, was powered by the Amazon Lumberyard engine when we last talked to him a few years ago. Well, Dyack's studio went through several engine changes before eventually landing on Epic's technology after patching things up with the company following their previous dispute over Too Human.

Now a user of the leading game-making tool, Dyack pointed the finger at the current state of the industry, largely absolving the engine itself and adding that most game companies do not really even have time to optimize games anymore.

Most people who use Unreal Engine 5 have very large teams and those very large teams have a lot of people who know one specific part of what they do. There is an artist that all they do are blades of grass. They optimize for the blades of grass, but they have no idea what's happening in the other systems. And when you have two, 300, maybe a thousand people working on these systems, they're all going in their own directions and they're all doing whatever they can to make the game the best. And to have technological oversight of all of these things is very difficult.

A lot of these teams have some very experienced people, but a lot of them are not that experienced. They're coming in with two to five years. And I've been in the industry now for 35 years, built my own engines. At the end of the day, optimization is really hard. When you have an all-around engine like Unreal Engine 5, it's going to be good at everything. But if you're going to make a racing game versus an open world RPG versus a 2D game, the optimizations are extremely different, and you have to know your game to get in there and optimize it.

The sad reality of the video game industry right now is it's in such poor shape that most companies don't even have time to optimize. The game's working, they ship it, it gets out there, and they haven't spent any time optimizing it, and it runs like hell. It's not the engine's fault. It's actually the state of the industry. Since we talked last, there have been a few Black Swan events and also what I would call an extinction-level event as well. The ramifications of the extinction-level event are still happening. A lot of my colleagues are gone and a lot of the money that used to be in the industry is gone. We're going to continue to see over the next 2 to 3 years, maybe 4, a lot of the relics of the mistakes that were made before continue to happen until a lot of that gets fixed up.

But what it means is if you're going to optimize a game, you're not putting in any content, and all you're doing is trying to make it run faster and be better. There are a lot of people who think that's not worth it. Just put more content in, get people excited about all the new stuff in the game, and, you know, forget optimization. So, my opinion is it's definitely not the engine's fault. It's more of the state of the industry.

Later in the interview, Dyack clarified what he meant by "extinction-level event". He was referring to the infamous "transformative $2 billion deal" that the Embracer Group was negotiating with the Savvy Group before it fell through at the last minute in May 2023. Embracer Group's stock crashed, but that was just the beginning. Over the following months and years, Embracer was forced to sell off most of its many studios, recouping what capital it could while keeping only a small number in its portfolio.

This, in turn, meant that when Embracer started liquidating its studios and shelving its projects, all those prototypes, built with tens of millions of dollars of Embracer's substantial capital, suddenly flooded the market as publishers scrambled to pick up new titles. These were demos built with budgets that independent developers could never match. They looked exceptional precisely because enormous amounts of money had already been poured into them.

Every publisher and platform holder looked at this sudden influx of polished, well-funded prototypes and naturally gravitated toward them. The pipeline of publishing slots filled up fast, while independent developers who had been going through the normal process of pitching their own, often far more modestly produced prototypes, got pushed further and further back in the queue. In many cases, these small studios simply ran out of money before they ever reached the front.

According to Dyack, 50 to 70% of independent and mid-sized developers are now gone entirely, and in most instances, they were studios that had been running for several years, if not decades.

Dyack expressed gratitude that his team, Apocalypse Studios, is still up and running amid this widespread catastrophe. On that note, he provided some news about Deadhaus Sonata: a demo is available for download now via Steam, and the goal is to launch an early access version of the game later this year at $19.99. This initial version will only feature the vampire class, but more content will be added over the course of the 18-month-long early access, including:

• 7 Total Playable Classes
• New Areas, Dungeons, Towers, and other locations.
• Hundreds of Tarot Cards and Inscriptions
• Additional challenges and achievements that will grant the most powerful Inscriptions
• Community-generated Content tools that integrate directly into the game, allowing Gamers to Create Content within the Deadhaus Sonata world. The community will be able to create Dungeons, Campaigns, Cities, Specific Items, Stories Lines
• Character Customization Options
• Enemy Types and Bosses
• Additional Stories and Quest lines
• Voice acting, dialogue, in-game cinematics
• Social Features like text chat and voice chat

The full version of Deadhaus Sonata will be free-to-play with cosmetic microtransactions for monetization.

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