We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.
Yeah that’s fair. It’s you can nearly cordon off the engine and then upgrade it to keep the same functionality it could work well. I guess it really depends on estimated hours to figure out if it would be more economic to make a new game or new engine.
I just am cynical about Jagex’s willingness to spend money in this space. Ever since they’ve been owned by venture capital, everything is penny pinched; it needs to have an obvious return on investment.
We as players normally only see the content developers in interviews, and they’re often folks that don’t even have proper computer science degrees or training. Jagex internally for years has hired largely unskilled workers into their QA department and then promoted them into “developer” positions that work with RuneScript.
I’m fairly confident the engine team was a skeleton crew (and one split among developing iOS, Android, and Desktop clients) until the last few years when it became apparent at least some investment into the engine on the server side/more broadly was necessary.
I looked into joining their engine team at one point, and then promptly walked away when I saw the payscale.
Basically, I see no reason to give them slack; it’s actually a bit counter productive in my view. The community should be stern that Jagex should address their issues rather than running from them and constantly blaming “yesterday’s Jagex” for why “today’s Jagex” is making bad decisions, can’t do XYZ, etc
I also just wanted to add; if you want to look at what this looks like when the game development company is functioning properly look at Crytek and Hunt Showdown.
Crytek has publicly stated Hunt has a lot of issues internally in its code base. They then responded by committing to fix those issues (i.e. fix their spaghetti), and then they followed up by actually fixing issues (off the top of my head, an advantage when peeking from the left down to how the game handled the player camera was fixed, bugs in the ammo system resulting in a number of issues with reloading were fixed).
They didn’t stop there though. They said in their last roadmap update, they’re working with their internal CryEngine development team to make major changes to CryEngine (and this is reflected by Crytek’s CryEngine team stopping release of CryEngine to make major refactors for CryEngine 7) to do everything they want to do, remove hacks coded into Hunt’s fork of CryEngine, and pay all the tech debt down to get Hunt running on the most recent CryEngine (and hopefully keep it there, with all the tech advances that brings).
There was and has been consistent follow through.