[Bekwnn]

The author probably underestimates the limitations of Unity, especially earlier versions from back when The Witness was made. It would kind of be surprising if all the things in that game were possible to do with reasonable performance in Unity back then, especially without paying ~50k+ for source access.

It feels like the article almost but doesn't quite touch on it: there's people firmly in multiple camps, and gamedev tends to be camp 3, but also very often camp 2 and/or camp 1.

To get AAA or even AA games running requires a lot of dogma from camp 2. Graphics programming, procedural generation, and gameplay systems complex enough to produce emergent gameplay would be camp 1 from the sounds of it.

I feel my feet firmly stuck in all 3, at any rate.

[pjmlp]

Having been part of demoscene and still having a feet in game dev scene, dogma is exactly the right word to describe it.

Game development appears to only move forward when some console or OS vendor steps in that asserts "this is how we are going to do it now".

It happened when moving from Assembly into high level languages, adopting C++ despite all its bloat (vs C/Pascal/Modula-2) thanks Watcom, PS SDK and DirectX, Objective-C/Swift (thanks Apple), C# (thanks Unity, Managed DX, XNA/WP 7,...).

If one of the big names in consoles would release a WebGL/WebAssembly based games console, with a couple of first party titles that would show its potential, Mario or whatever, we would see a couple of studios running to get a place on their store.