So You've Decided to Move from Unity to Unreal Engine

Epic is a highly profitable private company controlled by the founder. They have no incentive to mess with a business model that works; their margins are higher than Unity.

Unity has over 3x as many employees as Epic, much lower margins, is publicly traded, and they've been losing money hand over fist. Everything is subject to change until they make money, shut down, or are acquired.

Some disagreements based on my experience working with UE for the past 11 odd years. Mind if this all sounds negative that I really like working in the engine and would recommend it for most game projects. I just think you should be aware of what you're getting into.

> Unreal and Unity are not game engines in the same sense.

This is mostly a true description, but

> It's the same way with Unreal, except you're not getting "whatever Epic ended up with when making Gears of War"

No, a lot of what you're getting is "whatever Epic ended up with when making UT, Gears of War, Paragon, and Fortnite". You can very much feel their previous games in it. This is good and bad; good in that the tools you need to ship a real game are all there and the engine is actually battle-tested; bad in that the tools you need to ship a game that doesn't fit that mold might not be and there could be a lot of stuff that will get in your way if you decide the Epic Way doesn't suit your project. UE4/5's adoption does help a lot, things were rougher earlier in UE4 and in the UE3 days.

> Porting to consoles isn't an outsource job here.

Nah, we needed help to ship Chivalry 2 on console and WinGDK. Many smaller teams do outsource or contract for assistance. It was months of multiple programmers and tech artists, it really wasn't one person x one week.

> Upgrading to the latest version is not a big deal.

If you're a tiny, Blueprint-only indie / side project I guess this is probably true. It takes us weeks though.

> Unreal introduces new systems carefully.

We and other teams I've talked to had a policy of waiting for the first hotfix revision of a major UE4 update before attempting an upgrade, though.

> I heard Blueprint sucks!

See my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37512356

> I heard Unreal is geared towards first person shooters and it's a struggle to make something in my genre!

As above I don't totally buy the rebuttal. If you're doing something way out of left field you can do it in UE, you might have to bypass a lot of Epic's way of doing things though.

> What if I don't want fancy graphical bells and whistles? What if I'm not making something in a realistic style?

I've not worked on VR or mobile but I've heard that Unity scales down better. Some of UE5's nice stuff (nanite, lumen) also doesn't scale down well.

It's also worth noting that if you're concerned about Epic Changing the Deal and doing a rugpull like Unity, they've said you can simply not accept the changes and continue operating under your existing terms you agreed to:

"If we make changes to this Agreement, you are not required to accept the amended Agreement, and this Agreement will continue to govern your use of any Licensed Technology you already have access to."

You potentially lose access to epic services of various sorts, but it's a far cry from the Unity situation.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal (Section 7)

Or move to Godot/C#.

But the original article and the post we're all replying to isn't arguing for using it for "discovering and learning to intuit the API" - they are arguing for using it for the bulk of coding tasks.