Why big game development companies don't share their engine?

Well, As you know, a curious hobbyist game developer like to make games like big games that pro game development companies make, so he probably wants to find out what engine or language did they used. Unfortunately even if you searched hard you will notice you are not allowed to ask this type of questions becasue you're probably getting no answer

So, Why Big Game Development Companies don't ever say what engines, or languages or resources , or etc.. idi they use?

In my mind they are 3 possible reasons:

1- They are afraid of competition from indie developers or lose popularity of their game

2- They have their own-made engine & They don't wanna share

3- They don't use an engine at all

It's really a head-scratching topic

If you know anything let's discuss it peacefully!

Well. Most AAA games/engines are written in C/C++, so there's that.

As for companies not talking about what engines they use. Nothing could be further from the truth. There's actually plenty info online. No matter whether a dev uses UE3/U4, Crytech 3, Unity3D or rolls it's own, there's usually info/tech videos around.

Just why would/should a company which spent millions developing its own engine for its own works give it away?

It's actually really surprising to find a company writing it's own engine from scratch (at least in the AAA field). Usually it's heavily modified/added to versions of existing pro engines.

As for why they don't share the engine, sometimes it's because the work-flow is so incredibly complex that fans would be unlikely to do anything useful, and then your competitors would just learn your tricks. In the case of games that want to produce paid DLC, that kind of limits how much freedom they want to give people over adding and changing things in the game content, so I feel that's a relevant point in that the companies that plan DLC would not want people to be modifying their game.

Jayjay well,i see you in every Naji thread

— Heh I just get drawn into the open questions sometimes

Jayjay

Jayjay thanks for answering every topic I post and — I'll reply on your topics if you want

Naji lol don't do that

Actually, many do: Epic (UDK), Crytek (CryEngine), Valve (Source), id (Quake), Sony (PhyreEngine)...

On the other hand, others prefer to keep their tools secret and, considering they invested millions of dollars for developing them, I see this as an understandable choice as well. After all, this is a very competitive industry.

cheers!

No one team developer engine create own engine, when they running deadline build game,

Sometimes they use someelses engine.

money usually. especially if we're talking about 3A engines. like cryengine, unreal etc..

i know that cryengine is cheap for commercial use with ~80% money going to crytek and no support - around 10$ a month or so.

but if you want it to fully be yours it's around 2.5 mil $. why? if you think taht develoment took around 2-3 years which is around 40 months, multiply with how many people worked on it (let's say 10 but it's usually ~100-200 or even more) that's 400. then multiply that with their paychecks around 5 000$. and there you go - 2 000 000$.

if they gave it for free and didn't return the money they spent on making games on their own engine - they would just dissapear as a studio, or end up in huge debt.