I know the anecdotes don't help - they are just anecdotes. But man, it really doesn't fill me with confidence that I'd be given much help if this happened to me.

Or in another anecdote - there's a dude on my street who drives a 20 year old BMW. I can see on DVLA's website that it hasn't been taxed in 4(!!!!) years. He continues driving it every day. There are ANPR cameras around every major road here - and nothing continues to happen to him. For 4 years. Why am I paying taxes for my car then, if clearly there are no consequences for so blatantly and visibly breaking the law.

And one more - there are literally gangs of people in balaclavas riding electric motorcycles around where I live, in parks, on cycle paths, on the roads...I keep reporting them, only to be told that the force has no available officers to deal with them, but even if they did it's pointless chasing them. So I ask again - What's the point of having a surveillance state with cameras on every street, if you can't actually use them to catch criminals????

There is this just massive disconnect between Britain the surveillance state and Britain which has given up on upholding the law. I don't know how to reconcile that in my head.

I've been a low level engine programmer in video games all my working life. I worked on a few AAA games that sold 20M+ copies, I'm not saying this to boast, I'm saying this to say I know how the sausage is made. My literal day to day job is fixing issues like "The RHI thread on the Switch takes 0.5ms longer than it should" and optimizing things as much as possible.

I think if you asked me few years ago, I would have also taken the same stance you did - that these tools make it "too easy" and we get unoptimized crap out there.

But you know what, nowadays I feel like I mellowed out a lot. A lot of these so called "friendslop" games are horrible in terms of technical work. And you know what? They still bring joy to people. They still make people laugh and have a great time with the people they like. One of my favourite memories from a game I worked on was reading comments from people who said they were looking forward to just playing the game after work in the evening with their friends. Was optimizing the IO performance on PS4 essential to make the game happen? Sure. But what mattered more was that the game was actually fun to play.

Nowadays I see the improvement in tooling as nothing but a positive. There will always be hardcore engine programmers who know how to do this stuff, I have zero doubt about it. But allowing people to just download an engine and make the thing is absolutely fantastic. To say that it's bad - to me personally - that's gatekeeping. Saying you can't make a game unless you know how to write a renderer or a physics system is so offputting to people who want to make a game but just don't know how - we should be encouraging them, not chastising them for it. Little Big Planet did it well as one of the first games of that kind, if you recall that - just saying, here's a sandbox, make a thing that brings joy to other people. Isn't that what gaming is about?

And on a more serious, business side - it's kinda crazy that Epic lets you use UE for FREE until you start making serious money on the game that you made. You can start a company, hire people, and just start making the game you want to make without paying anything for the tooling. Very few other companies in the world let you do this.