Unreal Engine is not for the hobbyist...

[anonymous_user_3da1d5cd]

Hi guys, it’s great that you are open for criticism.

Well, think about this guy, who ever wanted to develop his very own special game idea, he does not want to share his idea, nor to talk anyone about it, until it has a stable base.
He has some experiences with C++ or 3d programs like blender, and he also managed to write some ■■■■■■■■ with unity3d.

He wants his game too look good and provide a comfortable gameplay.

Until the day he discovers the unreal engine.

He starts to read the articles. Goes through tutorials. Downloads your offline wiki archived and reads and reads. Tries out some demos like the action RPG example.

He loves Linux and can’t access the asset-store, what is really painful. Spending days with workarounds. Under Linux sources compile 8-times faster (believe me).

He tries to understand the cooker, but the articles just cause confusion. He tries to package apps for mobile devices. It works, but everytime it costs like 5minutes.
How can he develop the deep down layers, like bluetooth or background-services, notifications, sensors… Would spent year with it.
Isnt there anyway to cut off the whole content necessary for the high end graphics? To improve cooking time.

He cant even manage to program a threaded/async https request, because the documentation is just bad.

He cant even manage to create a walking animation.

And the UI still changes with every version of Unreal Engine.

The Visual Studio code binding under Linux is weird. Visual studio code creates 25gb project data file?! Yes it does!?
Cant you integrate some lightweight editor like atom?

Whole day searching good and working documentation.

He cant understand the packaging or plugin-management.

He wants to use sqlite, but what if people root the device and access game data?
He cant manage to compile sqlcipher and create plugin from it.

Maybe he’s just to stupid…

He does not even know how to version his project, because he does not know, what is compiled stuff and what is project stuff. there isnt any clear barrier. Or H just did not find it.

Or its because he cant spent whole day with it.

His project get out of his sight, and epic wont benefit from it. Mh, they do, they got bug reports from crashes.

[BrUnO_XaVIeR]

This is just my own opinion, but I believe Unity perceive this profile as a target customer while Epic Games does not.

If you manage to get around the challenges, great, if not… Well Unreal is serving big successes such as Mandalorian and Final Fantasy remake, year after year; the indie dev really isn’t the priority as a customer.

If you are resilient, you end up improving yourself as a more knowledgeable developer and eventually you succeed with Unreal. If you have a tendency to give most likely you end up returning to Unity or Games Maker because of your comfort zone calling you back.
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While with Unity, they don’t really see any advantage in you growing as a developer, learning c++, Objective C and etc.
The less you know and more you use their services, the more you buy from asset store, for their business model, the better.

So I think it’s a matter of where your goals are.
If you just want to make a “game” and post it on Steam for $100 just to say you did it, if you copy “scripts” from google to develop your game in Unity, almost sure you’re going to suffer with Unreal for a few months, minimum.
The people who know Unreal really well, they do not go out posting “scripts” for others to copy on the internet, they are too busy making a lot of money on indie games that don’t look like indie games and the public have no idea it’s actually a indie game. As a reflection of that, the perception that “nobody use Unreal for anything” and “the userbase is very small” is very strong from the outside, but couldn’t be farther from the truth.

So, yeah I think they are different tools that overlapped business for a short period of time, but they focus on completely different markets for their products.