Is there any point for a solo dev to use UE4 over Unity?

[WalkingDead]

@VFe;563936

It’s about as difficult to learn UE4 C++ as Unity C# if you have no experience in either one.

Given the criteria you laid out, there is one huge advantage that UE4 has over Unity for a solo dev and that’s cost. UE4 has a lot of standard powerful tools(example: materials and shaders, sequencer, etc) that have no free equivalent in Unity. depending on what you use it can cost between $500-$1500(total, not per tool; shadeforge, playmaker, etc) to buy the unity marketplace equivalents of many of the UE4 tools that are included in the base package for UE4.

The second is source access, I used Unity professionally for 5yrs and regardless of any feature they ever add in the future, I learned my lesson and will never switch to any product that doesn’t have source access. You may rarely or never need it, but when you need it and don’t have it, you’re in for a wild ride of wasted time. UE4(and other source accessible engines) give you the freedom to know that no matter what roadblocks you face, you at least have the opportunity to address them. Black box engines do not give you this freedom, and at least in my experience, I find Unity users often changing their game design and mechanics to fit the engine, where unreal allows you to do the opposite.

That to me is absolutely invaluable, well the 2nd isn’t an argument specifically for a solo dev, I think it’s the most important argument for a game engine choice.

Thank you very very much for your post. I am now free to work on my first game as I no longer have a job “luckily I invested in land and in 4 years will have 200 coconut trees to provide me a salary every month”. I have never used either Engines before so I wanted to make sure I was picking the correct engine for my first choice. I don’t know C# or C++ so perhaps its better for me to use UE4 and C++ it might be more helpful to me in the long run.

I don’t have money to purchase all the assets in Unity for example some of their assets cost $75 for a FPS framework where as in UE4 it comes Free. I was just a little scared because the advice given to me in the past was usually “Unity is easy cause of C#” and “UE4 is hard because its AAA with AAA features you won’t ever use and its C++”

Looks like you have given me the info I needed to pick UE4 I don’t want to pick an Engine and spend all my time learning it only to realize one day UE4 was simply the better choice.