Unreal Engine

Xbox's new layoffs cut 1,600 roles now and 3,200 by 2027, with four studios spun out. Among the reported casualties: the idTech engine team at id Software, the lineage behind Doom, Quake and every Wolfenstein since.

The thread's sharpest read wasn't nostalgia. Keeping an in-house engine means keeping engineers who know it, and can therefore ask for more. Switch to Unreal Engine and you rent low-wage contractors instead, hired per project and dropped when it ships.

Lore uses Merkle trees and immutable revision chains like Git, but it hydrates files on demand from a central server instead of cloning everything — the architecture games need when an artist has to lock a 3D model nobody can sanely merge.

Skepticism arrived fast. The docs read as LLM-written, the site pegs a CPU core trying to render, and one recurring objection: tying your entire version history to Epic, a for-profit company with a track record people don't fully trust.