this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2025
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Cyberpunk 2077
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If the engine is indeed a "miracle", then why ditch it for UE5?.
Not holding the person accountable, it's probably a shortsighted "management" decision to ditch an engine that had been improved an order of magnitude since the launch.
All is see is more costs and money down the drain to get the the developers up to speed and as productive.
Can someone in game dev enlighten me, please?
Maybe in the short term, but long term it will save costs and speed up developers. If they keep their own engine, they have to continuously spend money to keep developing it, and every developer has to be trained to use this engine.
So while switching does cost money, staying on their custom engine will cost far more in the long term.
It can be more of a mixed bag than that, though. If your employee retention and training is good enough that you have plenty of people who wrote the engine or at least understand it really well (which doesn't seem to be the case at CDPR since Cyberpunk's crunch), it can be much faster to alter it than to figure out the equivalent guts of Unreal Engine. That won't end up making a difference if you stick to well-trodden paths that lots of games from lots of studios use, but if you want to do something that Unreal doesn't support out of the box, it can be quite hard to wrangle.
That's only if your employee retention and training are good enough, and you don't plan on growing your team. When adding more developers you either have to invest incredible amounts of time and money to get everyone to that level (and we're talking years per developer), or you'll be left without the ability to really alter it while still having to educate every new developer on your engine.
This approach simply doesn't scale or work out in the long run.
To make it short: UE5 has a ton of pre-existing talent and CDPR lost some people experienced with REDengine in the fallout from the initial cyberpunk 2077 crunch.
The result is that future titles will be much easier to develop for though UE5 has some serious performance issues, those issues CAN be fixed via a combination of in-engine settings and making a few manual changes but it remains to be seen wether CDPR will make the effort to customize the engine to suit their needs.
From what I remember they're doing so many changes to UE that one of their biggest changes is being merged into UE5 itself. Just because they're moving to the other engine doesn't mean they don't also have engine developers working on it. It'll likely be much more optimized than your typical unreal engine game.
I remember an interview where one of the lead devs mentioned UE5 needs to be optimized as you go.
Apparently, you can't just build first and hope to optimize everything later. It becomes far to complex to do it that way, and that's the way most studios are used to working. They often even have two seperate teams and seperate development phases.
So it's a little encouraging that they've changed their workflow to prioritize optimization and engine efficiency.