The industry titans can afford to develop "any" amount of custom tech, subject to schedule constraints, since the art and marketing budgets tend to vastly outweigh the engineering now. But in the last decade, they've tended to shy away from really ambitious tech projects, favoring incremental improvements to a general world-simulation model that applies across all the typical AAA genres. In their risk assessments, they've decided what kind of product and technology is being made early on, so that the bigger expenses aren't in danger. As well, sticking with the same toolset allows it to be further refined.
Indies, on the other hand, have a lot to gain by taking on ambitious technology and de-emphasizing the costly assets - and usually, the technology itself isn't risky, so much as it is just an "unknown engineering challenge" - something that could be a few days or a few months. Something like Braid or Minecraft can be achieved by experimenting and chipping away at the concept over a few iterations. Minecraft's earliest versions didn't have a lot the "big features" that are in the game now.
But it's also incredibly scary to take on those projects all alone, so the majority of indies aren't even going to consider it. Indies are looking for "easy" too, even if it's bad for them from a business standpoint.
I do think that engines like Unity have a lot of value and can even be extended to include some new technology. (I started working on something that builds on Unity's physics system recently - and it shows some promise to be a unique product) But the people who are taking on the unknowns just tend, statistically speaking, to be the people confident enough to write everything themselves too.
The industry titans can afford to develop "any" amount of custom tech, subject to schedule constraints, since the art and marketing budgets tend to vastly outweigh the engineering now. But in the last decade, they've tended to shy away from really ambitious tech projects, favoring incremental improvements to a general world-simulation model that applies across all the typical AAA genres. In their risk assessments, they've decided what kind of product and technology is being made early on, so that the bigger expenses aren't in danger. As well, sticking with the same toolset allows it to be further refined.
Indies, on the other hand, have a lot to gain by taking on ambitious technology and de-emphasizing the costly assets - and usually, the technology itself isn't risky, so much as it is just an "unknown engineering challenge" - something that could be a few days or a few months. Something like Braid or Minecraft can be achieved by experimenting and chipping away at the concept over a few iterations. Minecraft's earliest versions didn't have a lot the "big features" that are in the game now.
But it's also incredibly scary to take on those projects all alone, so the majority of indies aren't even going to consider it. Indies are looking for "easy" too, even if it's bad for them from a business standpoint.
I do think that engines like Unity have a lot of value and can even be extended to include some new technology. (I started working on something that builds on Unity's physics system recently - and it shows some promise to be a unique product) But the people who are taking on the unknowns just tend, statistically speaking, to be the people confident enough to write everything themselves too.