A true difference in knowing how to use the tool. Obviously, the creators of the engine are going to put out a more optimized game than pretty much anyone else using it.
Don't forget having the team work 90 hour weeks for multiple years to power the success.
Edit: I like that I'm getting downvoted by fanboys of epic for pointing out the large human cost to games being "updated as fast as gamers want it". https://www.polygon.com/2019/4/23/18507750/fortnite-work-cru... if you don't know but games are very complex simulations and very hard to work on. Keeping fortnite up to date took a ton of effort by a ton of people in a not really sustainable way for peoples lives or careers to make it a success. Also can take irreversible impacts on help and psyche.
And really every time I played that game it was still massively buggy. For instance build to weapon switch issue that locked me out of controls for 1-3 seconds on a regular basis.
And epic got very good at the cheating stuff because they were helping blue hole solve the same issues and got to prototype it out on pubg and got a headstart there. Yeah that's a risk of using a team's engine but...
They could've hired more people and got the same work cranked out in similar time, long hours != popular. Plenty of companies have cracked the whip, but it doesn't always lead to success.
Sure, this is true. If it is one person. These games are huge, with multiple teams. So this is clearly not true. No one person knows one part of the game.
You easily get the situation where creators know better than the makers.
