C# doesn’t apply to Windows in General, if you’re a Unity user you should know Mono allows it to be cross platform compatible. Also a lot of reservations about C# don’t stem from C# as a language, it’s because of the god awful ancient version of Mono in Unity, it has GC issues, it’s buggy in areas and it lacks features but that’s not specifically Unity’s fault they had a tough time with Xamarin (Although from an end user perspective it’s their problem not ours). The version you can rent on a monthly basis from Xamarin won’t have half of these issues…
Playing devils advocate with myself, because I can always see two sides to the story. C++ in UE isn’t as bad as dealing with C++, GC / Mem alloc is taken care of unless you want to go and do something outside the box and personally I found C# to be very verbose in most scenarios. I had an 800 line char controller that I did in 70 lines with UE and C++, in some ways I found it easier but then again I have always preferred scripting languages… I’ve been doing this nearly 16 years now and all I did was C++ I’m at that point where I just go with whatever is easiest. I’m long past the time of spending months messing about with engines and tech, I have a game to make and that’s what I do… Whatever gets you there fastest .
I don’t actually believe for a second Unity is easier!.. If you don’t want your game to look like every other Unity game based on the same or similar shaders, you need to dig into shaderlab C style syntax and at that point especially when dealing with post, you really need to know what you’re doing, also C# is very flexible and powerful, there is nothing you can’t really do in it and that’s a problem within itself. The asset store seems to cater for most of the gaps, I’ve said this all along random Joe comes in and creates features in a couple of months sorely lacking. So if one man band random Joe can do it by himself in a short amount of time, what’s Unity’s excuse?
This do it yourself or buy from the asset store mantra doesn’t fly with me, why don’t I just use rendering and SDK templates for the platforms I’m interested in and save myself $1500.00 per seat?!
Although I will say, Unity is much easier to navigate and clean up. Performance woes? No problem, bake and run Umbra… Problems gone away (when Umbra worked right :D), Lightmapping generally was never an issue with Beast (bar the 32-bit limitation) the lightmapping generation process worked properly and it was automated on import (something I see Epic are doing). With Unreal it’s a bit hit and miss at the moment, especially for open world stuff…
But the biggest issue with Unity is there end goal, everything seems mobile centric to me. They advertise AAA visuals, yeah sure if you’re back in 2007!. Also even if you hacked away to improve the “visuals” for many months then the rest of the engine needs to support it, not so long ago they didn’t even have a 64-bit editor. How long has sheer basics like a 64-bit editor been in UE and CE?