Why didn’t you just use…

It’s an embarrassment of riches in big open world video games this year. I’m still fully immersed in building bizarre monster trucks in Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, but Bethesda’s “Skyrim in spaaaace”-em-up Starfield is out.

I’ve not played it yet, so I’ve no opinion the the game itself. But I am very amused to see that as always with a large game release, the armchair architects are wondering why Bethesda has continued to use their in-house engine instead of something “off the shelf,” like Unreal.

This phenomenon isn’t restricted to games, either! I don’t have a ton of game dev experience specifically, but I do have a lot of experience with complex multi-year software projects, and every time one of those wraps up, there’s always someone that looks and what got built and asks “well, why didn’t you just use this other thing”

And reader, every time, every single time, over the last two decades, the answer was always “because that didn’t exist yet when we started.”

Something that’s very hard to appreciate from the outside is how long these projects actually take. No matter how long you think something took, there was a document, or a powerpoint deck, or a whiteboard diagram, that had all the major decisions written down years before you thought they started.

Not only that, but time and success have a way of obscuring the risk profile from the start of a project. Any large software project, whatever the domain or genre, is a risky proposition, and the way to get it off the ground is to de-risk it as much as possible. Moving to new 3rd party technology is about as risky a choice as you can make, and you do that as carefully and rarely as possible.

I don’t have any insight into either Unreal or Betheda’s engine, but look. You’re starting a project that’s going to effectively be the company’s only game in years. Do you a) use your in-house system that everyone already knows that you know for a fact will be able to do what you need, or b) roll the dice on a stack of 3rd party technology. I mean, there are no sure things in life, but from a risk reduction perspective, that’s as close to a no-brainer as it gets.

At this point, it’s worth publishing my old guideline for when to take after-the-fact questions seriously:

• “Why didn’t you use technology X?”—serious person, has thought about the tradeoffs and is curious to know what let you to make the choices you did.
• “Why didn’t you JUST use technology X?”—fundamentally unserious person, has no concept of effort, tradeoffs, design.

Like, buddy, I if I could ”just” do that, I’d have done it. Maybe there were some considerations you aren’t aware of, and probably aren’t any of your business?

Thus what I part-jokingly call Helman’s Third Law: “no question that contains the word `just’ deserves consideration.”