this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2025
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Cyberpunk 2077
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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.