[stonewareslord]

I agree with your assessment.

> a stack made for a single game is not a game engine.

For a concrete example: the newest Lego game, Star Wars the Complete Saga, had a complete engine rewrite ("NTT") and the new game is the only one that runs it. I wonder what term the author would use to describe NTT, which isn't designed to run a single game or have a community.

[ohgodplsno]

What does a complete engine rewrite mean ? Is it just a new renderer with deferred shading ? Is it a bunch of new gameplay tools ? Is it a start-from-scratch thing ? (Which would be absolutely stupid).

Game engines are more of an ecosystem. Yes, the community is a thing because the devs seem to be a small indie group that uses Godot so they can ask for assistance, but Frostbite does not have such a thing (well, maybe internally at EA), and yet noone would say it's not an engine. As long as, through an upgrade, your engine keeps the same way of working and you're familiar with it, it is an engine as a whole. UE and Unity are two different engines because the workflows are different. But UE4.0 to UE5.0 is still the same engine, you won't take that much longer to get back in the groove.

[ratww]

> Game engines are more of an ecosystem

Not really. In the case of Unreal/Unity/Godot (and perhaps things like Quake and Source before it), sure. But there is definitely more to engines than this, which is the argument being made.

We probably need a better term to differentiate traditional engines from the big ones that come with an integrated editor. But until we do, there are many sizes of engines.

> As long as, through an upgrade, your engine keeps the same way of working and you're familiar with it, it is an engine as a whole

Again, this is the controversial part. Engines are traditionally not about editors and workflows and whatnot. Sure the term has changed recently and a lot of people now have this impression, but until there's new terms, engines come in different sizes.