is actually a common misconception. Please, don’t take personally, I see such statement quite often and I think it’s invalid.
Big chunk of AAA studios won’t use Unreal because they have enough manpower to build tech for their games (EA, Ubisoft, CD Projekt, Sony internal studios). Yes, UE3 was developed with biggest studio in mind, with license costing like half a million dollars upfront and for first person shooters. Sadly for Epic, biggest guys in industry decided to ditch Unreal Engine and develop their own engines.
Epic had to adapt and expand its reach. UE4 can be used by ambitious hobbyists who could create entire game without ever touching C++. Of course, it would be composed of messy blueprints and such hobbyist would encounter many limitations. It doesn’t mean it’s an AAA engine…
Small and medium-sized studios rarely even hire a rendering programmer.
UE4 is designed from ground up for small and medium-size studios, just think of Blueprints or any kind of tool which gives a power to designer/artist. Material editor, Niagara, Sequencer, Animation blueprint, tons of tools. None of these could described as “done for Epic games or AAA only”. UE4 gives you a lot of flexibility, you’re able to create very different games. Which available engine allows you for so much without buying plugins and even opening IDE like Visual Studio? It’s the last engine I would complain “I need programmers here”.
Obviously, you would need to hire programmer if you’d like have a new tool with new UI. It’s the same for every other engine. What else would you expect?
Although… 4.22 actually adds basic way to create editor tools in UMG. Still… people would say “stupid release, I don’t need ray tracing, Epic doesn’t care”…
“AAA game engine” are built with specific kind of games in mind i.e. open worlds, action-heavy multiplayer game, etc. Trust me, if you never worked with older Unreal generation or in-house engine like The Witcher engine. UE4 cares about small and independent studios a lot, engine is designed for needs of very different games and studios.
Public voting for features is terrible idea as it assumes that multi-billion project (development of UE4) should take seriously voting on public board where any enthusiast would vote on like 50 cards/features that actually don’t need in current project, but he thinks it’s cool . I did it myself, now I see it was pointless.
Often people don’t realize that some cool features would require re-writing huge part of engine in order to satisfy a relative small amount of games, i.e. custom gravity direction. In effect we had plenty complaints like “Custom gravity got 200 votes, why it hasn’t been implemented yet? Epic doesn’t care!”,
Yes, Epic partially prioritized Fortnite while developing engine for a long time. We all should remember that…
- I can’t think of any or system in UE4 which could be used only by Fortnite. Please point such , if you see any.
- strategy pays off, now they reinvest Fortnite income into engine’s development.
- We all benefits from Fortnite developments, we got battle-tested engine. Epic knows how to build designer-friendly, artist-friendly tools - they use it to produce their own games. Meanwhile Unity needed years to implement very basic system of “nested prefabs” and its networking system sucks, nobody wants to use it.
- Many important engine tools started as tool prototype for Epic’s games, i.e. Niagara, Gameplay Abilities.
Robo Recall has been created as VR test.
That being said… I totally agree we should have a proper roadmap. Currently browsing changelists is the best way to get updates on future releases. It sucks. Information is there, but nobody want to provide it for us.
PS Keep calm and learn to love Fortnite 