Universal Engine

Carmack fell silent.

His brain was rapidly working through the operating logic of this model.

Nakayama Takuya struck while the iron was hot and laid out a concrete commercial framework.

"Big companies are perfectly capable of shouldering this expense. To avoid scaring off small and medium-sized development teams and independent creators, I suggest setting up a tiered payment threshold." Nakayama Takuya wrote a string of numbers on the whiteboard. "Using this engine for learning, testing, even developing commercial games—all of it will be free of licensing fees in the early stage. No matter how long you tinker away in your garage, the foundation won't take a single cent. Only after the game is officially released, and its total revenue exceeds a certain amount, will the foundation begin collecting royalties belonging to that project."

Yuji Naka added an explanation. "We can set a fairly generous threshold. Before it makes money, the engine is free. After it makes big money, it hands over a little profit to feed back into the community. This revenue-sharing model is much more reasonable than buying out a commercial engine license for hundreds of thousands of dollars in one lump sum."

"And this money doesn't fall into Sega's or id Software's pockets." Nakayama Takuya pointed at the three words "foundation" on the whiteboard. "The funds flow into the foundation's account, to pay the salaries of core maintainers, lease server bandwidth, hold global developer conferences, and directly reward community members who contribute high-quality code and assets. The more people who participate, the more problems the project solves, and the more prosperous the entire ecosystem becomes. No giant can monopolize a collaborative network of this scale."

Jensen Huang stopped spinning his pen. "Game companies will be very happy to accept this plan. Developing a next-generation 3D engine from scratch