The HD era and indie

Graphics, tools and storefronts grew up — and development turned into a sequence of engineering-and-business choices. PBR made materials physically meaningful and portable across any lighting; Unity / Unreal / Godot turned "write an engine" into "pick a platform and a money model" (and a vendor dependency); and Steam went from a shelf to a visibility algorithm, where attention is the scarce resource and launches are won before they launch.

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2005–2012

Engines, rendering, distribution

Three layers of the era that grew up: what you pay for using someone else's engine, how materials became physics, and why making a game is now easier than getting it found.

Engines: Unity / Unreal / Godot~17 min

What each one gives you and when to pick which. Buy vs build and vendor risk: the Unity Runtime Fee saga, Godot's rise, UE5 royalties.✦ open

PBR rendering~18 min

Physically based materials: microfacets, Fresnel, energy conservation, metallic-roughness. + 🏠 an interactive sphere lab.✦ open

Steam, wishlists and launching~17 min

Steam as a visibility algorithm: the 30/25/20 cut, wishlists, Next Fest, the first-week flywheel. 19k releases a year.✦ open

Indie production~16 min

Scope as the indie killer: the planning fallacy, the vertical slice, runway, the barbell market and postmortems.✦ open

Module 5 follows the course concept (see CONCEPT.md + ROADMAP.md). The full source text is 05-hd-era-indie-revolution-2005-2012.md. For the technical layer under the engine see Module 8 (rendering, ECS); for monetization, Module 10.