Ali Brown · Director of Graphics Engineering

Yeah, I mean, it's a similar question to the previous one, in that every developer that is not using Unreal or any big engine is going to have that same question. And it's not really that different, to be honest, than the last 10, 15 years. Maybe since, say, Unreal 3 came around, when we started to see these big engines and also the publishers that have been joining more devs together. So I don't think this is anything new. Obviously, there's always going to be the big new shiny thing, and some company, not always Unreal, sometimes other devs, will come up with the new shiny thing, and everyone will learn from that, and they'll trial it, and they'll look at the success or failure of that engine, that game, and see if that technology survives the test of time. And if it does, other studios will naturally make their own version of that and absorb it into their pipeline. So I think that's just the natural ebb and flow of the industry. Somebody will push ahead in one area, and other people will eventually catch up. It's continuous. I don't think it's always one engine, though. There are things that the larger companies can push much harder on, like the tooling, because they are selling a product, their engine, to people that maybe are not even professional game devs sometimes. So they have to make the tooling very powerful and easy to use. It's less of a focus when you have professional devs that are very used to the engine. So yeah, I'm not going to pretend that we don't look at, say, the latest UE5 technology and say, that's pretty good. There's some really impressive stuff there. Nanite in particular is very interesting. But I'm not particularly worried, as long as we continue to develop our engine, as long as we continue to maintain and grow our graphics team and keep up with the latest technology. We will be there. It just doesn't mean that the day after Unreal implement Nanite, we're going to implement Nanite. And obviously, when the latest thing comes out, and we're not talking about Nanite here specifically, just in general, there is always the assumption that it solves all of life's problems. And then you wait six months or a year and you find out that it solves a subset of problems. It's not the solution to everything. There are many aspects to a full package, a full engine like we've got or Unreal.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So as long as we continue to maintain the engine and grow the graphics team and everything, we should have no issue keeping up with the cutting edge?

Ali Brown · Director of Graphics Engineering

I think so, yeah. I mean, our visuals are still cutting edge now. There's areas of the engine that we are extremely proud of that will match or surpass other engines, and there's areas that are not as good that we need to improve. So I don't see a major issue there. And for example, they picked Unreal, so I'll talk about that, but the Nanite tech, it improves the quality of geometry. That's super powerful in some areas. It's a benefit everywhere, but the main thing is natural geometry. So for planets and things like this, that could be a great benefit. But it doesn't do as much for some other types of geometry, internal spaces. And I think our quality on our interiors has been extremely high for a number of years and matches any other game I see. It's not that we don't want much better natural geometry. Yeah, we'll get there. But I'm not worried as long as we maintain the development, maintain the team. As long as you're not going to fire us tomorrow, we're all good.