I too would love to have a Blender game engine. But removing it was the right (though painful) decision. It caused a code maintenance nightmare by duplicating and reimplementing a lot of other code, and removing it makes adding new things to Blender much easier (like Interactive Mode).

Back when I was using 3D Studio Max, I wished it had a fast sleek efficient minimal game engine runtime called "3D Studio Min", but that never panned out either.

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/106972/what-will...

>As for the reasons for removal we can conclude it was an old and aging component, it was largely unmaintained, suffered from several bugs and limitations, and the Blender Foundation probably lacked the energy, motivation and manpower to maintain it properly.

>"Adding new things to Blender gets much easier that way. The Blender Internal code started in early 90s. Over 25 years old! Functionally, EEVEE can (and will) completely replace it." -Ton Roosendaal

>It was also very architecturally outdated, lagged severely behind the current industry standards and modern technologies in many ways, it would be very hard to bring it up to date. Modernizing it or introducing new features would end up being more work than a full rewrite from scratch. [...]

>What About Forking It?

>UPBGE is a third party fork, whose objective is updating and modernizing the BGE with better technologies and features, with the end goal of eventually merging it back with main Blender development branch.

>I fear its future is uncertain at this point unfortunately. While I believe Blender developers won't actively do anything to purposefully break Blender trunk codebase compatibility, I speculate it will naturally become increasingly hard for UPBGE developers to maintain their code working, as features are removed and main Blender development deviates further from the current design. [...]

>There have been talks about replacing the old game engine with a newer better integrated "Interactive Mode". It would be a more integral part of Blender, as opposed to a separate component with a lot of duplicated code that re-implemented a very limited subset of supported features we currently have.

>This is not meant to be a direct replacement of the old BGE, nor a discrete game engine in the traditional sense with wide publishing capabilities, rather more of an integrated real-time "presentation tool" or interaction mode with a physics simulation sandbox environment, that runs directly inside Blender's viewport on currently supported platforms.

>On 28 May 2018 Ton Roosendaal announced in the Developers Mailing list that a portion of the 2.8 Code Quest funds were reserved for the development of a new and improved real time rendering system or "Interactive Mode" and Benoit Bolsee, a developer historically known for his involvement in real time side of Blender, accepted a grant to work part time on this for one year.

https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2018-May/0...

https://www.blender.org/2-8/quest/

https://code.blender.org/2013/06/blender-roadmap-2-7-2-8-and...

>I speculate this will probably feature a new node based workflow and logic system, real time physics, and integrate well with other upcoming features like "Object Nodes" also known as "Everything Nodes" in one way or another.