Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

A platform which takes input, which is participatory, is probably going to do much better about the core thesis (in bold on the article):

> As impressive as UE5 is, I don't think the technology has to do with its appeal as much as the long-term user experience.

I agree there's not a ton of explanation & support for this point. The post does jump to a very specific topic, whether the source is open / takes PRs. For sure there's a lot more that goes into this question. The post explicitly says it leaves others to deal with a lot of the pain of the back-half of Unity development, so it's not even like there's a ton of winning moves UE has to play: they just have to not self-inflict grevious wounds.

It is, however- unsaid in the article but clear- incredibly much easier to keep yourself in a respectable, easy to use shape when you are open source. The post talks about a specific bug, but just things like improving the build toolchain or adding support for some new developer tool: developers will happily improve their quality of life in a product, if you let them.

I've worked as professional Unity developer for 8 years after learning it as a hobbyist for 3, and I'm happy to finally be rid of it. It's good for prototypes and beginners, sure. But when you start to build big projects, you learn that al those learning resources guide you towards using awful architectural practices, and that there's a million of edge cases and weird bugs that would absolutely kill your project but will stay unfixed for years.

Also, since ~2015, Unity as a company have been more and more interested in developing shiny prototypes of new features that would look great in presentations, but it would take forever to finally get them to be production ready, and they would be rid with problems even then. It's as if Unity cared more about increasing numbers of newcomers than retain old-timers and studios which already invested heavily into the engine.

But I have to be honest, if you're doing mobile 2d game development, want to ship a product on both operating systems and don't want to invest in building your own game engine, it is still the best option. There are other solutions, but none have such an incredible amount of tools and assets.

Big publishers/game developers just negotiate a custom contract. But yes in general UE is more expensive then Unity but it also comes with a bunch of useful stuff like quixel mega scans for free if you are using the engine.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/license

It's actually much better for indie developers because it's completely free to build and ship something and see if market wants to before worrying about subscription costs etc like in Unity.

unity always required that you use a mouse to manually drag and drop certain things in its GUI interface (prefabs), and this is intolerable to people who feel like their entire project should be storable in simple (text) files. otherwise what are you supposed to do, take screenshots of the state of the editor when everything is dragged and dropped into the right place? it’s so bizarre