The article attributes all these free engines to Unity but I think they've missed 20+ years of videogame history.
First, Valve has always been very open to game mods. Some of their most popular franchises (TF & CS) grew out of the mod community around HL1 and they've always made tooling available for the Source engine.
HL1 was based on the Quake engine and id has always embraced the mod community. Id software has also contributed greatly by open sourcing their old engines.
The Torque Game Engine (Tribes) was opened up to low cost licensing by GarageGames in the early 2000s.
Unreal has long made their tools available for free, though licensing wasn't quite favorable to the indie developer until more recently.
Blender made an attempt at including a game engine but it never really took off from my point of view, although they're still including and improving it.
Even Blizzard's inclusion of map tools with Warcraft 3 spawned one of the biggest gaming trends of the past 10 years, DOTA / MOBA games. Though these have all been recreated with other engines (including Valve's Source), the inclusion of modding tools with games is part of the story and some of the competition that the current crop of free tools must face.
Open source deserves a mention as well. Ogre 3D, the above mentioned Blender, and other engines and especially tools have sprung up in a variety of games and often fill missing gaps in asset creation.
Unity certainly deserves some credit, however. Their simple tooling, relatively early start on mobile, and aggressively lowering the barriers from side project to published game has definitely moved the goalposts for game tooling. The Unity Asset Store is also a great thing.
I've really only scratched the surface though. XBox DNLA deserves a mention, the role of the iPhone and mobile in general has been huge, Minecraft's until recently ambiguous quasi-open source nature, and there's many more. We're in a golden age of game creation and I hope to play some amazing new game ideas. I realize there's also going to be an abundance of mediocre imitations from creators like me but its all part of the fun.
I'd go much further back. The idea of turning the game engines and tooling into a commodity dates at least as far back as the early 80's, and I'd expect it dates back to before that too.
SEUCK was £19.95 in 1988[1] and the price had crashed to just £5.99 by 1992[2]. Even accounting for inflation, that must have been less than £50 / $75 in today's money.
SEUCK was awesome - I wonder whatever happened to Shaun Pearson, the guy who made all those SEUCK games for the Zzap!64 Megatape. I think Outtake Two convinced me to buy my copy of SEUCK.
"It’s something of a golden age of video game engine licensing. Not too long ago — hell, 5 years ago, licensing a big, brand name engine (including Source) involved gnarly negotiations, NDAs, and a small mountain of cash. Then Unity came along and changed the game."
Unity did change the game. There have always been game engines and game makers. But Unity was the first big name engine, with complete tooling, to go free. Suddenly developers had access to a full featured game engine with little upfront investment. If the game failed, it wasn't as big of a deal. If you payed the half a million for Unreal or Source, and the game failed, you had bigger problem.
Torque tried, but failed to compete. Blender, Orge 3D, Panda 3D, etc never became big name, widely used engines. They might be cheep/free, but good luck getting everything to work. The documentation and support just aren't there.
Modding is different. Unreal and others included their editor so you could mod the game, but you couldn't make a new game and sell it. You had to stay in the confines of Unreal/Half-Life/Warcraft/Starcraft. DOTA and Tower Defense came from the Warcraft 3 modding community, but they where still Warcraft 3. If you want to release your modded Warcraft 3, sell it, move it to other platforms, then you either have to pay for the engine, or use another engine.
I recently chose to give up on Ogre3D as I was completely frustrated by my inability to make it run on mac. It's also way too big (I don't know if OOP is a reason for that, but I still tend to dislike OOP nevertheless). For example it doesn't seem that you can choose to not use the scene graph.
I loved that engine at some point, but as time passed, I wasted an incredible amount of time trying to either build it (oh the pain) or make a project run across platforms (mac especially).
I recently found an opengl 3.3 core profile tutorial (learnopengl.com, it's really good for motivated beginners), I felt really better learning that since I like to understand how lower level stuff works and how to make things as simple as possible.
Unity/source/unreal engine are great when one wants to sell a beautiful, smooth 3D game quickly and doesn't have too specific or uncommon requirements. But when you want to experiment, there's nothing else than raw opengl.
I really wish Ogre3D was lighter, or that there was be a minimal engine with plain helper functions that let you use, understand and talk to OpenGL to make the best use of it. I can understand that indie devs want to be able to use the best 3D right away, but sometimes it can be nice to give more control to the programmer.
I guess I hard a hard time learning by myself, or that I'm just trolling out of frustration. 3D is not easy and sometimes I think some small dose of KISS would be appreciated.
i think the true best thing is to just build your own engine from the ground up in openGL. it's labor intensive. and it's not what you should do if you want to make a game. but, every graphics programmer has an engine. and it is never finished. it's a lifetime project that you can continously keep building, refactoring, and adding onto to learn new things.
the only real way to learn programming is by doing. no amount of reading can really burn knowledge into your brain. by implementing things like model->world->camera space transforms, quaternion rotation, shadow mapping, lightmaps, deferred rendering, etc yourself, you will end up intuitively understanding them.
And the Sony Yaroze (Playstation 1) and PS2Linux (Playstation 2). The PS3 doesn't count as it was a crippled version when compared to the hardware access level offered by Yaroze and PS2Linux.
The CryEngine version sold on steam is £7/$10 per month (slightly less if you buy a longer subscription), and apparently has no additional royalties if you commercialise your project.
That seems very reasonable from the outside for any seriously interested parties, potentially just reduces support queries from casual users.
The free SDK apparently had a 20% royalties clause at the point of commercialisation, so this deal sounds much better.
The thing that boggles my mind is how there seems to be concern about this concept of charging 5% (like Unreal 4 does).
In my mind (not a game developer - tell me if I'm way off here), the framework gives you about 90% of the work up front (10s of thousands of man hours). Then, once you finish your game and it's a success (sales-wise), you pay only 5% of your revenue. This seems like a wonderful deal, right?
Absolutely. In the 2000s the Unreal Engine had a price tag of half a million dollars up-front plus royalties (I don't remember the percentage) on the back end. That these companies are giving their engines—even their source code—away essentially for free indicates either that (1) engine sales was never a very lucrative line of business or that (2) the promise of establishing your technology as a defacto game engine standard—the Panavision of games—is even more appealing than immediate revenue.
Licensing engines was insanely lucrative, until Unity. Then everything changed -- you could go out and get a good engine with decent framework tools for a few hundred bucks. Why pay six figures up front and X% of revenue when a few hundred bucks for Unity did the job just fine?
I suppose once you've done all the big sells then not that many come along and gradually scaling the price down to increase base of users comes naturally one way or another in whatever market. This and competition gradually edge each down.
Still, it takes one company of note to make that big move and the rest end up following in the same direction.
But today it is not all about having great tools, it is about users knowing how to use those tools that drive demand and establish standards.
As for Steam, well, most games will also be sold upon there store, so win win.
Either way, maybe schools can now expose students in tools that are not just for games but have users and functionality that transcend many fields from modeling, CAD like mock up's and a level of detail and control a bit more than the popular Minecraft, which is in many ways a much simpler form of what these game-engines are today.
So demand is there and opportunity as well. Be interesting how this pans out for game prices long term. As with anything, when supply at a comparable quality hits a level then the only way to stand out is price and lower running costs to get started and investment. Impact upon established studio's could be interesting, if anything it makes what they do more competitive and beyond franchise work, which your cheap startup is not going to be grabbing, then not much will make them stand-out if they stay as is. I see many opportunities for consultancy work and also a increase in the talent pool. Solely due to increased numbers of people able to learn the tools and sue them.
As for which one becomes a standard, well, once we settle down upon one operating system for everything is when such matters are close, but far from today on so many levels that there will always be competition for a long time to come.
Engine sales used to be lucrative, quite a few companies have been based solely on that business model for years. But just like most things, the market changed over the years. High quality alternatives started to appear, big publishers started making or buying their own tech, and easier entry to market are among some of the reasons.
In my mind, the biggest contributor is simply competition.
This is a very good point. In all honesty, id Software really moved from 'making games' to 'making tech demos' with Quake 2 and Quake 3: Arena. The same is pretty much true for Epic and the Unreal Tournament games.
I think non-game development is accustomed to taking tools and giving nothing back, particularly with open source. GPG provided a sharp wakeup call around this recently.
Game development does this but I think less as game architecture can require significantly fewer tools. Rovio were once called out at a GDC convention for giving nothing back to (the port of) the physics engine they use, stuff like that can form the majority of third party code in a game:
For development tools, we all remember paying for development environments in the 80s and 90s. But then GCC was everywhere, Visual Studio had a usable free version, and Borland went up in smoke for various reasons. Platform owners realized that they were in a race to make development as easy and cheap as possible for their platform, except for a few odd cases where that wasn't in the best interests of brand image (game consoles, iOS).
Libraries are a different story, but if you look at e.g. C# development tools you'll see that they're subsidized to drive adoption of Windows and SQL server licenses. Java was an attempt to drive people to Sun hardware, and now Oracle is monetizing it with the Ask toolbar (I guess?).
I agree that 5% to the engine developer is a wonderful deal - however, having a working game engine in no way means 90% of the work is done. That's when the really difficult work begins.
Video games need to trigger an emotional response in order to be successful. From visual design, to audio design, game rules/logic, controls, testing, marketing...this list goes on. It's far more than raw tech resources; psychology is a huge factor in game development.
Consider that an engine are all the resources that go into cutting down trees, gathering materials, making pigments, etc. that all go into the resources of painting a masterpiece on an easel. You could certainly do all those things, but you don't need to if you want to create a new masterpiece.
IMHO, 5% works great for indies and small devs. It lowers the downside risk of an unprofitable game and only gets expensive after you can afford it.
It does not work well for large-budget AAA games. In those setups, only a small percentage of revenue goes to the developer after paying back publishers, marketing and distribution. Taking 5 out of that is a huge hit. That's why Epic explicitly expects large budget games to negotiate a custom deal. That's something Epic has a long history of with UE 1,2&3.
The 5% Epic takes is from of the gross product revenue rather than the net. In an age where some AAA games can sell a few million copies and still not turn a profit, Epic is smart enough to pick the model that avoids losing out to Hollywood accounting.
I don't know enough about the games industry to know whether 5% of the gross is an overly large chunk to spend on the engine developer. It does sound reasonable to me, but if not, the onus would be on the dev, not Epic, to find some leverage to renegotiate a better deal.
I think this is the difference between big shops with big budgets and small indie developers. Lets say you make a game that sells $100,000 on steam. That's pretty impressive. What's your take home then?
Steam takes 30%, taxes take 20%, engine takes 5%, marketing costs take 10%, etc. Now you have $35,000 left. Even in the best case scenario of a solitary indie developer that's a piss poor wage for someone who can make a game in a year that sells six figures on steam. Every little bit helps.
Now compare that to a game that sells $20,000,000. That's what, 7 million take home? That's 200x the take home pay, yet it doesn't take 200x the staff or 200x the time or 200x the cost to make it. The system is geared for big shops. Smaller shops just seem to get a rougher deal.
Guys like Notch are a rare exception. For most smaller devs saving 5% is significant savings.
Based on your own hypothetical, that means you would spend $5,000 (or about 15% of your overall budget) for all of the mechanics that an engine provides.
There are certainly games (e.g. visual novels) in which this wouldn't be very cost effective, but in most cases I believe that represents a huge value.
Sure, this doesn't make sense for VN's, but its not surprising that a lot of indie success stories are often 2D games that don't use these pricey engines. The cost is a disincentive as well as the extra 3D work compared to what can be done efficiently via 2D.
The value argument doesn't make sense if my original vision was a 2D pixel game that I could personally do in my spare time compared to being given the hottest 3D engine and now asset creation and dev is 10x the time and cost.
The big winners here look to be mid and big shops. Not to mention the asset stores these engine companies run. Having tons of indie devs suddenly buying all these 3D assets must be nice considering whatever cut Unity or Unreal are getting.
Minecraft was written from the ground up. Writing their own engine in Java has been the subject of great debate because of how poorly optimized it is, how every update shattered the mod scene, or how much work it takes to port it to all the various iterations on all the various platforms.
Terraria was written in .NET using XNA and met with huge success. But they too have seen similar problems and have to use external dev houses to get the game onto other machines.
Starbound is custom built. They messed up so badly with their initial build that it took them almost a year between releases to even release an update.
Kerbal Space Program _does_ use Unity, but even they hit a wall of shame caused by using the engine in a 32-bit variety. Mods are much easier because the platform is written using a "standard" framework, but the game will implode if you require more memory than 32-bit can address.
There are also plenty of success stories (Prison Architect might be my favorite game to watch develop) but I think the more complex the basis for the game, the smarter it might be to start with something that's proven and work your way up from there.
This assumes you can just plug in the engine and all is well and good. Many of these engines are optimized for certain types of games and do not play well when bent against their will. There is a large cost of learning to utilize the engine and get the best performance out of it. You are also heavily committing yourself to something where it is possible a wall could be hit and there would be no way out of it. Moving away from one of these engines is very expensive and may involve re-writing the majority of the game. It is not something you want to decide lightly.
Wonderful, yes. But I see many more "it's 5%, not free" comments than "OMG 5% is soooo expensive."
These engines are not free, you just don't pay up front. It's a great success of their marketing that news websites and internet commenters are willing to go to bat for the idea they're "free," when they're so very obviously not. If you use the product for it's intended purpose, you're paying. If they weren't going to make much money off of you in the first place, there is a free trial to get you using their platform.
Unless you're an established studio I'd just pick whichever engine/environment you find most appealing and worry about the money when you actually make any.
Very inclined to agree. Especially with such a small percentage charge, it seems pretty fair to pay for the work that goes into the framework that makes the game even possible.
No, if it is made a commodity, which it clearly is becoming, then that is nonsense. You wouldn't offer to pay 5% flat rate of your investment banking revenues to whomever provides your hardware. This is the kind of business model fapping that happens on HN because the audience are desperately trying to get people to pay for their unimportant services & products.
Actors, directors, and writers still pay 10% to agents across the board for their services, despite the fact that there are tons of agents in Hollywood. Seems reasonable to pay 5% of revenues to an engine that does all the work rendering your game, if you don't want to write your own.
Companies like Valve and Epic have already amortized the cost of development of their engines - those are codebases that span 16 years, and both companies had multiple commercial successes. All it took was Unity to give a little nudge.
Now, IMO, the reason for giving so much for free is to keep a player out (Unity) and milk the cow one last time with the eventual royalties.
I think it's clear by now the next generation will be real-time raytracing (engines like Brigade [1]), so I wouldn't doubt they are already working on those, and to be sold in the old model.
Real Time Ray tracing is still very far off. Brigade serves as a good proof of concept, but a lot of things are yet to be researched and implemented to make it viable in commercial sphere. Seeing the progress, I do not think commercial real time ray traced game will be a reality any time soon in this decade.
It's been "next gen" for decades. It's just a terribly inefficient brute-force approach to lighting a scene. I don't think it'll ever be viable for real-time graphics.
Even if it'd be viable, the traditional approach is much faster and easier on resources. You still want to retain a part of the GPU for physics, maybe. Or run on lower-end hardware, too. Using ray-tracing for accurate shadows or reflections in part of a scene may be viable, but I severely doubt games will just use ray-tracing for rendering. CAD and architecture stuff may benefit more from that, I guess.
It will probably need GPU's to at least slowly into ray/path tracing engines, like what Imagination is doing. I think we'll probably get there within 10 years. 100+ TeraFlops should do it.
But I'm sure ray-traced engine is the killer-app of the Oculus Rift, and companies like Valve and Epic are aware of that gold rush. Once people see ray-tracing on VR they are not going back.
I doubt that raytracing is going to ever jump the gap from 'next gen' to 'actually used'. As others have commented, it's been the mooted 'next big thing' for decades. The problem is that raytracing doesn't bring any great improvements to graphics. Even the Brigade engine demo that you link looks worse than the current engines.
(Although, bonus points to Brigade for not featuring a mirrored sphere in their demo. Every other raytracing demo that I have ever seen adds these in, as if what we've all been missing from our 3d is mirrored spheres! It's a sure sign of desperation and lack of imagination when raytracers resort to those :)
It will when the resources used to emulate proper lighting gets close to the resources required by a ray tracer. That will happen if we continue to improve graphics.
Maybe we'll stop improving graphics sometime pretty soon and focus on physics, or maybe the game engine vendors will focus on licensing out assets to make game development cheaper instead of the current graphics race. But as long as the best use of GPU power we can come up with is graphics, we will eventually arrive at ray tracing.
> Companies like Valve and Epic have already amortized the cost of development of their engines - those are codebases that span 16 years, and both companies had multiple commercial successes. All it took was Unity to give a little nudge.
That doesn't seem to be the case. It seems that UE4 was a pretty major rewrite, and major development is ongoing: https://trello.com/b/gHooNW9I/ue4-roadmap . Source 2 looks to have been a big effort for Valve too.
Even if they refactor, the point I make is there's 16+ years of know-how, and the fundamentals are still the same (compared to something completely different written from scratch like a ray-tracing engine).
BSP, meshes + LOD, lightmaps, occlusion, particle system, terrain editor (since UT 2003)... it's still all there.
There's probably a bit of the Photoshop Effect going on, where companies are mostly interested in having their tool become the dominant one - and the dominant skill - in the industry over piracy litigation.
We're in a perfect storm of access to development tools and interest in indie development thanks in large part to Steam and Kickstarter.
In the case of Valve, I think what butters their bread isn't Steam anyway, but the games people end up making with it that Valve get a cut from through Steam.
In addition to the business model, another key question: source available or not?
For reference: the Half-Life (GoldSrc) and Source Engine SDKs, long free to download for modders, are on GitHub these days, but don't contain the complete engine source code.
Note: The above space previously claimed the full GoldSrc code was available, because that is what I read somewhere and is repeated at least at [1], but this appears to be incorrect. Sorry :|
Based on the context of the "free for content developers," it sounds to me like they mean it will be free for people developing add-on content for existing games, not that it will be free for people making their own games.
I agree. If it was free for game development, they would have said "game developers" and not "content developers."
Someone in /r/gamedev posted a link to this press release. [0] It looks official, and steamdb is usually reputable. Here's the most relevant section, it definitely doesn't sound like Source 2 will be free for original game development.
> "The value of a platform like the PC is how much it increases the productivity of those who use the platform. With Source 2, our focus is increasing creator productivity. Given how important user generated content is becoming, Source 2 is designed not for just the professional developer, but enabling gamers themselves to participate in the creation and development of their favorite games," said Valve's Jay Stelly. "We will be making Source 2 available for free to content developers. This combined with recent announcements by Epic and Unity will help continue the PCs dominance as the premiere content authoring platform."
That's a grey area surely. Much of Valve's output has been people making completely new own games out of existing games - CS, TF2 and Dota all began life as mods to very different games.
I think that they'll have monetisation in place either through royalties like Epic, or just their cut of Steam sales. I don't see why they'd worry that someone used Source to make a brand new game they're almost sure to profit from anyways.
From a purely gamedev perspective, examining the Source engine taught me a lot about engine development, so it's exciting to hear about the next version.
Valve's articles on how they implemented networking in Source are particularly useful and interesting[0].
Odd that idTech, known historically as a corss platform engine that was unique for being opened after its profit was done, is now seemingly one of the more closed engines on the market.
Masters of Doom makes Carmack sound as responsible for ID's culture problems as anyone else. (Mind you, I'm not sure how reliable that impression is: in some places the author gives the impression that he'd pencilled in Carmack as the designated baddie of the story.)
I've read the book as well. I'm not sure what to make of it in terms of why id went the way it did. Anyway, Carmack remained, and after Romero left I believe he had a leading role in id. Yet he seemed to remain isolated in his principle of opening up his code now and then. Since Carmack has left id has been a fully closed house of software. Pretty sad. At the same time, I dont care since they did not make any notable game recently anyway.
Carmack didn't "sell out", he spent decades at id and was responsible for vast swathes of 3D technology and the open-sourcing of multiple cutting edge game engines.
He went above and beyond what you could expect of anyone who cofounds a game development house and he is treated like a literal programming icon for good reason.
In this case it's more a polite way of saying "the founders got forced out" - or more bluntly: the idiots in charge managed to get rid of id's greatest asset.
Bethesda once claimed that third parties distributing through them would have access to Id Tech, but now it appears they're now fully vertical, and no longer publishing outside of their own studios.
Check out Project Reality for a great example of a very engaging game that will benefit from game engine licensing like this.
Current version is BF2 based and some of the best squad based gameplay I have experienced.
Very interesting that I find this here! I was on the PR2 team for awhile before things stagnated. I don't think the team at this point over at realitymod.com would benefit from anything happening at EA in regards to BF2's license. A lot has changed and things are moving very slowly nowadays.
How does Source and Steam fit together? Would it make sense to lower a potential fee for Steam exclusive games built on Source? Would it be "risky" trusting the same company with both the game engine and distribution?
It's really great seeing Source 2, Unreal Engine and Unity lowering the bar for game developers to deliver their products.
In isolation, I agree with you -- this is what a competitive market looks like, Unity has forced the other engine makers to become more competitive. Competition is good.
In the broader picture... I'm not sure. I keep thinking about the video game crash of '83, and how market oversaturation crippled American video game makers for years. I wonder if the constant lowering of barriers to entry isn't hastening something similar. (Probably not nearly as bad, video gaming is a lot more mature as an industry right now, but still.)
Unity deserves a lot of credit, but I do think it was Unreal 4 going to the $19 subscription w/source last year, and their drop to free (w/royalty) this year that has been driving the market.
In 2015 oversaturation simply isn't a problem in any tech market.
Social media and the internet allows you to identify duds a mile away. Those who care will use it. Those who don't won't be causing a crash any time soon.
It's not a problem for consumers, but for indie game developers it may be. It's already hard enough making your money back with a 'good' game, the break even point could rise to 'great', with only 'amazing' games making decent money. Again, definitely not a problem for consumers but personally I don't want the video game industry to share the fate of the music industry.
I don't think Call of Duty is going to get wiped out or anything. Free to play phone games, though, for instance? Not saying I'm certain, but I could see it happening.
Source is an engine, Steam is a distribution platform. I think the only truly significant interplay is:
- Source games will probably behave well with the Steam Overlay and probably work in Big Picture Mode with controllers
- Steam recognizes the Source libraries as a distinct element, so you only have to download the Source engine once even if you have many games that use that engine
With Steam distribution, Valve already has a fat monetization pipe in place. While they don't need game devs to use their engine (Steam can certainlly sell UE and Unity games just as well), they also don't need to directly monetize the engine, thanks to their distribution near-monopoly. If a game using the engine is successful, Valve will get their share, adding a little engine "tax" to the already massive distribution "tax" would not make much of a difference in terms of money, but all the more in terms of user/dev acceptance. They don't need to directly monetize engine licensing and offering developers tools that are much better integrated with Steam than with other distribution options is a very natural business decision.
Also, a strong presence in the dev tools arena will certainly benefit their hardware-related projects, SteamOS/box and that whole Rift coopetition thing.
> Steam recognizes the Source libraries as a distinct element
I don't think that's correct, all Source1 games include their own copy of the engine and aren't automatically updated to newer versions etc. (Valve does update them though). The engine download is only for mods and some 3rd-party games.
The games you mentioned _used_ to run on the same branch of the engine, and when that does happen you only download it once. Most shipping Source games today use distinct branches of Source. There's a Portal 2 branch, a DotA branch, a TF2 branch, a CS:GO branch, etc.
Can Source 2 really compete with UR4 and Unity5? HL2 was amazing for it's time, but the reason that Portal looks so good is because most of the animations and lighting effects are pre-rendered.
Can any developer comment on Source, Unity, and Unreal and how well they handle mods after the fact?
Modding in PC gaming adds such an incredible level of value and creativeness that it being a constant afterthought is bordering on criminal. Steam Workshop is an interesting mechanic, but it would be nice if an engine set out a baseline in advance that didn't require using additional services.
Speaking of open source games, I hope openage becomes playable soon. I loved/still love Age of empires. Although, I have been playing 0ad and it's pretty good but has to cover a lot of ground in performance region.
Honestly I'm hoping Source 2 is everything I dream it can be. I've been focused on asset creation instead of game logic so that I have leeway in deciding on engine (which right now for me is UE4).
I'm interested in knowing if Source 2 will only be targeting PC and Steam Machines, or if Valve has plans for Xbox/PlayStation/Wii and iOS/Android/Windows Phone.
Due to the new steam machines running on linux there's a high probability for the games to work for os x as well. I think (can't find the reference right now) that gabe newell really want games to be able to run on all major pc os's.
Was Source even licensed as extensively as Unreal or idTech? I got the impression that most Source games were Valve's own and licensing the engine wasn't really a priority (or source of revenue) for them.
Not even close, most of the licenced Source games were existing HL2 mod projects being moved to a commercial standalone format. The only high profile original game ever developed on it outside of Valve was TitanFall, and they had to rewrite a good chunk of the engine to bring it up to modern standards.
A project like Titanfall isn't going to be able to treat an engine as a blackbox library. They're going to spend a lot of time tailoring that engine to their needs.
Anytime a game developer is asked to publicly comment on using an external party's engine, that developer is probably a producer and wants to make their project look good. They don't want their game to be seen on the same level as games that CAN get away with treating the engine as a blackbox. The exact reasoning they give (or internet apocrypha) are generally not very useful to understanding the changes they do make.
I don't think Source 2 was a surprise to many. Most of the people in the Dota 2 and CS:GO communities have been expecting it for a long time. Valve even explicitly stated[1] in early December that they planned "a major improvement to Dota 2’s engine that [they] are aiming to release in the first half of next year"
Developing the engine (even if it is mostly incremental enhancments from the games released over the years) must have taken up signifficant resources lately. If the engine is "done" now, there should be people available to work on new titles.
Maybe it will be a demonstration title running on SteamOS and SteamVR using Vulkan. I dunno, but they would probably want it to be special and pilot some new cool games feature.
I can't find any information on steam, thought thats where the news would be.
anyways, not sure what source 2 will look like, but if it means that we can use the existing source code for games like counterstrike or any of the valve's fps series, then for fps indie developers this is a welcome news.
we should see an explosion of new types of fps games with the availability of such base to build new games from, add new content, new modes of play etc.
Steam Box and VR is interesting, but only if it actually happens. So far we've seen next to nothing from the Steam Box idea except a ton of companies releasing small form-factor PCs that were originally slated to run Steam OS but then switched to Windows when Valve decided to back out.
First, Valve has always been very open to game mods. Some of their most popular franchises (TF & CS) grew out of the mod community around HL1 and they've always made tooling available for the Source engine.
HL1 was based on the Quake engine and id has always embraced the mod community. Id software has also contributed greatly by open sourcing their old engines.
The Torque Game Engine (Tribes) was opened up to low cost licensing by GarageGames in the early 2000s.
Unreal has long made their tools available for free, though licensing wasn't quite favorable to the indie developer until more recently.
Blender made an attempt at including a game engine but it never really took off from my point of view, although they're still including and improving it.
Even Blizzard's inclusion of map tools with Warcraft 3 spawned one of the biggest gaming trends of the past 10 years, DOTA / MOBA games. Though these have all been recreated with other engines (including Valve's Source), the inclusion of modding tools with games is part of the story and some of the competition that the current crop of free tools must face.
Open source deserves a mention as well. Ogre 3D, the above mentioned Blender, and other engines and especially tools have sprung up in a variety of games and often fill missing gaps in asset creation.
Unity certainly deserves some credit, however. Their simple tooling, relatively early start on mobile, and aggressively lowering the barriers from side project to published game has definitely moved the goalposts for game tooling. The Unity Asset Store is also a great thing.
I've really only scratched the surface though. XBox DNLA deserves a mention, the role of the iPhone and mobile in general has been huge, Minecraft's until recently ambiguous quasi-open source nature, and there's many more. We're in a golden age of game creation and I hope to play some amazing new game ideas. I realize there's also going to be an abundance of mediocre imitations from creators like me but its all part of the fun.