I get that you're writing stylized speculations but in my experience in the games industry, every single point is wrong. It is the most upvoted comment because it touches on a bunch of first-principles-know-nothing boogeymen, but so it goes with Hacker News nowadays. You can keep reading to find out why, or whatever, my dog in this race is (1) I use Unity (2) I don't think they're going to change anything about these terms except maybe the installs issue (3) and the vast majority of people will continue to be unaffected by these pricing changes.
If people want to spend their breath agitating for something, it's to get Unity to share the source code for a lower price. That would actually help me make better games. At the scale where Unity pricing matters, the engine costs will take away from marketing spend.
> ...the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to... break the promise of no revenue share/royalty pledge... too many headcounts... privately held [is good and public is bad]... says a lot.
Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an engine. You can certainly believe there is. It's a complex piece of software and target platforms and technology are always changing, so it's understandable that it is expensive to develop.
>If people want to spend their breath agitating for something, it's to get Unity to share the source code for a lower price.
while I hate it being gated, it's not that expensive for a medium sized company to get source code access. $3000 + probably some per seat licenses that are orders cheaper than what you pay employees (even significantly underpaid game devs). if you get more than 250k installs you're already paying more than that to begin with with the new plan.
>Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an engine.
maybe for you, but to pretend there are zero alternative tools because you don't like shows more arrogance than the post you are criticizing.
>I'm actually not saying that one person should use one or the other - they are simply made to do and make fundamentally different things.
it's a tool at the end of the day. you can make Unreal engine 5 run Undertale and you can make Gamemaker run Crysis if you are determined enough. Most people here will be talking about the technical aspects of the engine, not the political/historical roles each engine has made.
I can kind of see where you are coming from but I disagree with the angle that Unity/Unreal are fundamentally different skillsets. they are ubiquitous enough and feature filled enough that the limitations come a lot from the team rather than the engine, with a few special edge cases.
To name one: Unity and Unreal are awful for games with mass destructible environments for example. People CAN still make those, but that's the one case where it may be worth rolling your own tech. Essentially, you make your game separate from the actual unity layer and use Unity purely as a renderer, not for its game framework. I know Unity games that do this, and I think UE can do the same but I lack the knowledge there.
Completely agree. If I had to make a destructible game from scratch I would implement that tech in unreal rather than starting from scratch 10 times over.
And I'm not saying "from scratch". I'm more saying that I can't rely on Epic's actor/component framework to provide what I need. You can find other Middleware to help with mesh destruction and work around that as a base.
> Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an engine.
Depends on the game - the majority of Unity games can be done in Godot, as far as I can tell, because they're simple indie games with fire-sale assets (or even free assets) from itch.
Unity is not making the revenue they need, because their "popularity" is on free-as-in-beer games which no one is going to pay for anyway. It's just an added sword into their side that the majority of devs who use unity can switch to Godot with almost no difference to their (devs) revenue.
They simply serve very different audiences of both developers and end users. Their coexistence is evidence of how different they are from one another, not how fungible they are.
They really don’t at this point. Unreal has reached a point where it’s a better choice than Unity for nearly every single project. There’s still these pervasive beliefs that Unity is better for 2D or better for small teams, and it just isn’t true.
The one exception is junk mobile games, and even then I think Unreal is a completely reasonable choice.
Unity has been well and truly left behind with the gap widening every day and they know it.
Their coexistence is a legacy of a time where Unreal had not widened its viable use cases beyond triple A style 3D games, but that hasn’t been the case for years now. It’s just taking a whole for developers to catch up, and obviously there’s a lot of inertia with Unity projects and experience.
I am saying that only from the point of view of someone who has made and published a lot of games, in roles including developer and director, on a lot of platforms and dealt with a lot of engines. But I really hate making this about me. The outrage-driven discourse that people hitch onto to promote their shit is the worst excess of cultural materialism.
The most succinct explanation for the difference is that Unreal gets your game financed, Unity gets your game made.
> There’s still these pervasive beliefs that Unity is better for 2D or better for small teams, and it just isn’t true.
You're coming at this like a feature box checking sort of deal. There are so many bigger picture things going on with the differences between the two engines. I'm actually not saying that one person should use one or the other - they are simply made to do and make fundamentally different things. For example, if you're aspiring to make a top-ranked Steam game, it makes a lot of sense to use Unreal, because those are all multiplayer FPSes; and it also is telling you that you need a team of 10-100 people and at least an $8-$100m budget, because that's how much it costs to "enter" that space and build on Unreal. Your takeaway shouldn't be "for small teams" or whatever, because you're looking at the wrong stage in the pipeline.
And what I am saying is that they absolutely are not designed to do different things any more. That used to be the case, but Unreal has fully eaten Unity’s lunch here in a technical sense. The engine’s roots are in AAA first person, but they have grown it far, far beyond that. It is now a fully capable general purpose engine for anything from 2D puzzlers to AAA FPSes.
There just are not games any more for which Unity offers any legitimate advantages over Unreal. Unity has been incredibly stagnant as an engine for pretty much a decade, while Unreal has expanded its capabilities and feature set to now virtually fully encompass those of Unity. The idea that they are designed for different things is just out of date.
In 2023 I think the only legitimate reason to pick Unity, and this is a very good reason for what it’s worth, is experience with the engine. I say this as someone who published games in Unity in the past and has transitioned to Unreal. They are both general purpose game engines serving the same teams and the same games, with the exception that Unity cannot support truly top end games.
If people want to spend their breath agitating for something, it's to get Unity to share the source code for a lower price. That would actually help me make better games. At the scale where Unity pricing matters, the engine costs will take away from marketing spend.
> ...the only reason Unity went this route is because they don't want to... break the promise of no revenue share/royalty pledge... too many headcounts... privately held [is good and public is bad]... says a lot.
Ultimately there's no alternative to Unity right now as an engine. You can certainly believe there is. It's a complex piece of software and target platforms and technology are always changing, so it's understandable that it is expensive to develop.