As a LONG TIME Unity developer, I have watched over the past few years as as Unreal Engine became more and more focused, cohesive and usable for the smaller teams and even individual.
I have also watched and felt the direct pain as Unity becomes more and more of a patchwork Frankenstein. The various incompatible render pipelines alone are just … ugh! Then, there are all the years and money I have spent on having to integrate third-party plugins, just to do fundamental things that SHOULD be in-engine already.
All the while, UE 4.x in particular just kept getting better and better, technologically AND with solid, well thought out and well integrated workflow improvements to make it more accessible for development at a smaller scale. The business model also kept getting more and more consistent and friendly, especially to smaller devs. How can you beat “free” for most uses and sub-million dollar revenues?
But there is always a resistance to devote significant time and energy to any technology (in my case, UE) when you have a flow of projects on your plate with your long-time technology of choice (in my case, that was Unity).
Along comes the UE5 Early Access to push me over the edge, to give UE a SERIOUS shot again.
Now the past couple of weeks, I have been beating up on the UE5 preview, including converting a bunch of 4.x projects, digging into workflow and tech improvements, testing builds and pipeline stuff, and more. I can only conclude that, for the most part, it just works. The ■■■■ thing does what Epic claims it does, and those are some BIG claims. I’m particularly impressed that the early access is so complete and suitable for some real-world testing of the whole package.
But in parallel, I have also been re-implementing one of my recent larger Unity projects in UE4.26.
My experience so far has been like a breath of fresh air. Even in just a few days, I’m seriously making some rapid progress on this implementation and I haven’t had to even THINK about a third-party fix for something because so far, literally every core feature that I had to Frankenstein into Unity is already there in the core UE4 feature set.
BTW, I have spent YEARS fighting with constantly shifting sands of Unity render pipelines and on-again/off-again lighting solutions, not to mention fighting with core lighting and post-processing just to get something that looks reasonable on the screen.
Unreal? It’s freaking crazy how almost effortless it is to get good visuals and playability. Maybe it’s the years of fighting Unity that have built up my look-dev and other muscles so much that UE seems almost easy, even having to re-learn everything.
Maybe it’s because Epic “eats their own dog food”. Regularly making AAA titles in-house with your own engine is a key component to insuring your constantly improving tech and workflows are “production ready”. Unity does not do this. They do tech demos. And it is REALLY starting to show.
So this is my breaking point. Given how much I am LOVING the workflows and features of UE5 (and to a large extent 4.26), given all the factors mentioned above and more, and given that the timing is good in that I don’t have any hard dependencies on Unity projects in my pipeline, it has taken only two weeks of renewed hands-on to decide that I’m basically done with Unity. In retrospect, the move is overdue.
Wayne Gretzky’s dad once told him, “Don’t skate to where the puck is. Skate to where the puck is going to be.”
The puck is going to be at a UE5 launch in early 2022, and I refuse to miss out on the even brighter future ahead by not skating toward it.