Quote Originally Posted by phibermon View Post
I believe that for commercial game development, pascal will one day be a viable choice in the financial sence but that won't happen until there are sufficiently advanced cross platform capable libraries to choose from. [....] The best thing that could happen at this stage is for one engine to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them. An engine that does so much for you, that it's just a pain in the ass to consider anything else. I think projects like GLScene are pretty close to that idea and I've seen some impressive engines here in the forums but it's like they've spent their experience points in different stats, and nobody has reached level 60 yet.
These two statements assume that everyone in the game development industry uses third-party engines for creating games. By this logic, I guess we all should forget programming and software development beyond anything trivial and start using Unity3D from now on... On the other hand, I think you don't need any third-party engines to make even the largest game project, which in this sense is no different than any other software project out there. Therefore, the existence of third-party engines and libraries do benefit the game development community, but they are not essential to consider Delphi and FPC/Lazarus as viable platforms for commercial development.