These companies have super talented engineers and can afford to invest in skunkworks projects like these when they can’t find any suitable options in the market.

While this is true it does come with a big caveat. Every single AA developer has had access not only to the Unity source code, but in some instances also to Unity employees who became directly embedded in the production cycle. There’s a GDC presentation from the team behind Ori and The Blind Forest where they talk about how some Unity devs were flown to Austria to help out with custom tooling. Playdead also has a really nice blog where they talk about all the changes they had to make to the engine in order to achieve good lighting performance/fps for Inside. https://blog.playdead.com/articles/inside_presentations/insi...

I’m sure that if the Godot foundation had enough resources at hand then you would also see more games like Cuphead and the ones previously mentioned above.

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-steal-ray-ban-meta-m...

Creative coding is everywhere these days. From the parametric architecture of Zaha Hadid and MAD architects to procedurally generated furniture designs and jewelry. https://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/projects/

The reason why CLO is becoming so popular in recent years is because they’ve been really smart about striking partnerships with fashion schools and offering their software at steep student discounts. I once tried to get a price quote from a regional Optitex rep and they just shrugged me off because they only deal with BIG companies.

If there ever was an industry ripe for disruption it would be fashion. The incumbents have been resting on their laurels for decades so it’s nice to see upstarts like CLO trying to apply the Final Cut Pro formula to dethrone them.

"Pei says that Teenage Engineering is one of Nothing’s founding partners, and will drive the design aesthetic at his new company."

Nothing is very far from what I would consider a "big name company" They are actually a really small joint venture between Carl Pei and Teenage Engineering. This whole iMessage fiasco is exactly why I have such a hard time taking Carl seriously in anything he does. He seems more concerned with creating hype through smoke and mirrors than in releasing anything truly innovative and substantial.