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Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

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Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#21

Post by doikor »

sidlls wrote: post #16
theThreeTuples wrote: post #3

Unreal licensing is crazy compared to Unity. A % of revenue is millions of dollars potentially. You cant compare that to the fixed opex per developer seat with unity. It’s a strategic design for a company to use one or the other. So far in all companies I’ve worked for and have consulted for attribute their choice to cost and ease of hiring.

To underscore the sibling comment: at the point where a "% of revenue is millions of dollars" the company can easily afford to invest in an in-house solution if it's that important for their revenue goals. The tradeoff is hiring a sufficient number of skilled game engine programmers to make that work. It's not cheap.

Also it is not just making a game engine but you also have to build some kind of a editor, script/animation tooling, plug-in support, etc.

Basically if you are big enough that you can make your own engine the engine also has to be usable by non programmers making the actual content for your game.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#22

Post by klodolph »

suyash wrote: post #17
theThreeTuples wrote: post #3

Unreal licensing is crazy compared to Unity. A % of revenue is millions of dollars potentially. You cant compare that to the fixed opex per developer seat with unity. It’s a strategic design for a company to use one or the other. So far in all companies I’ve worked for and have consulted for attribute their choice to cost and ease of hiring.

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.

You only pay for Unity if you already have >100K in annual revenue.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#24

Post by suyash »

klodolph wrote: post #22
suyash wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You only pay for Unity if you already have >100K in annual revenue.

For Unreal from thier website - "A 5% royalty is due only if you are distributing an off-the-shelf product that incorporates Unreal Engine code (such as a game) and the lifetime gross revenue from that product exceeds $1 million USD; in this case, the first $1 million remains royalty-exempt." - much better than Unity's pricing. The > 100k annual only give you Unity Personal whereas you can full powered Unreal at much greater threshold.

https://store.unity.com/compare-plans https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/license

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#25

Post by tonguez »

golergka wrote: post #13

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…

“…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.”

this sounds like the way every other company operates. maximize profits above all else naturally resulting in the degradation of the product

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#26

Post by kaibee »

tonguez wrote: post #19

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

Scenes are serialized as text files (optionally) and you can save objects to prefabs, which can also be set to be serialized as text files.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#27

Post by steve_coral »

mrfusion wrote: post #18

Is Godot out of the question? Is it mostly a performance thing?

I've made several games in Godot and continue to use it, but it has serious issues that hamper it from prime time. Here are some I've encountered in my latest project, a point-and-click adventure in the vein of Myst

- When playing non-OGV video files there will always be a black screen in the first frame of the video, no way around it

- OGV video streams suffer from sound stuttering problems on playback

- There are some performance bottlenecks around 3D and occlusion culling, which will hopefully be fixed in 4.0

- No browser web view so you cannot use HTML for markup or design, meaning making interactive pages (like an in-game wiki) is a massive slog

- Font-rendering issues with blurriness and lack of pixel-perfect sizing (if you are doing retro pixel art fonts they will suffer from anti-aliasing)

- Importing 3D assets is wonky and you still need to write custom import tooling scripts in order to make it even slightly usable. Even then you will most likely have to redo all the lighting on your models

I think Godot 4.0 will be a great leap forward and I'm very much rooting for them. But if you are trying to make a big 3D A-level game, you will spend a lot of time with your head in your hands. At least with Unity and Unreal they have large asset marketplaces and very active communities so you can get around a lot of frustrations. Godot is still quite small in that regard. However for 2D or smaller scoped 3D indie games, it's really powerful and versatile. I personally enjoy the Godot workflow with nodes and signals connecting them much more than my experience with Unity and prefabs, which I found to be a bit convoluted.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#28

Post by dleslie »

doikor wrote: post #15
theThreeTuples wrote: post #3

Unreal licensing is crazy compared to Unity. A % of revenue is millions of dollars potentially. You cant compare that to the fixed opex per developer seat with unity. It’s a strategic design for a company to use one or the other. So far in all companies I’ve worked for and have consulted for attribute their choice to cost and ease of hiring.

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

Not even big; I am aware of indie studios having unity source. It's not nearly as expensive as you might expect, but I'm not able to give hard numbers. :)

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#29

Post by runeblaze »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #5

What is the learning curve on UE like? Unity took some time but it seemed reasonable for the tiny game I made. Also, is UE something to consider for 2D games? Or is Godot more the pick there?

The prevailing wisdom in my circle is that you just don't want to consider UE for 2d games. Godot is fine, but sometimes you just wish that you have that killer Unity asset that you have always been using.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#30

Post by minism »

Having worked in Unity as a hobbyist for about a decade and considering the switch to Unreal due to obvious issues Unity is currently facing (3 rendering pipelines being the main one), I'd like to hear more input from the programmer experience in both engines.

I think C# in Unity hits a really nice sweet spot: You have a powerful and expressive type system, can use nice high level features like async/await, you get (relatively) quick compile times which help your iteration speed, and decent runtime performance due to IL2CPP.

On the other hand, looking at Unreal, the main options seem to either be C++, in which case you sacrifice a lot of iteration time due to compiles, or Blueprints, which I really have no interest in (I like node editors for shaders, but i'd rather code all game logic). Those are both unappealing to me so I'm a bit stuck.

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