UE4 is bad for 2D I guess, which is why Unity is so popular. Most indies can only afford 2D it seems, and Unreal has always a been a big AAA engine for big studios.
Epic Games is worth $800 Million USD probably a billion by now who knows.
So one has to ask when you say how “popular” is unity you might have to ask how much money does this popularity make them? this popularity is among indie studios and hobbyist who make nothing.
UE4 is always a big hit with AAA studios who churn out hundreds of millions of dollars when these AAA studios make a game Epic is pretty sure they are getting money. With unity the dev most times do not even reach $100K USD
So what does popularity mean? if most games made with said Engine is not known and are simple 2D games for a niche market that sell on mobile for 99 cents?
@Spetsnaz_
Epic made UE4 because they basically lost their AAA clients.
Unreal is pretty much an indie’s engine now, despite there’s still a few big budget projects licensing custom deals to use UE4, 100% of AAA companies have their own proprietary in-house next-gen engine… sometimes even more than one in-house tech.
Epic was falling to their knees, they had to sell a large chunk of the company to Tencent in order to survive and not much longer made UE4 available to the indie crowds with open source, trying to earn back some market space.
By the time Epic did that move, Unity was already a 2B company.
Unity was so confident of their dominance that they was planning a 50% price increase for their Pro license, which I was one of the licensees… Epic announced UE4 going $20 bucks a months then Unity refrained for a while, they was a bit afriad of UE4; but few months later with already new CEO Unity made several surveys and seeing that almost nobody would leave to UE4 they have began implementing the shift to subscription model… Why charge ONCE for a perpetual license when you can charge 4x times that value from your licensees, forever?!
I find pretty funny that even today people can’t realize what is going on over there…
Still, UE4 isn’t that superior product from the POV you are implying, Epic would never make Unreal if was they on top.
Unity succeeded replicating Microsoft’s strategies (make people dependent then rape them), from a business perspective that makes Unity hundreds of time superior to Unreal. No surprise former Epic games president Capps now is a member of Unity board; Epic was falling, Unity was rising… He jumped ship and joined Unity together with that EA guy.
So infact today Unity is the big guy, Epic is the little guy :]
To add to what many have stated I will add my experience to this. I have done A LOT in Unity 4 and 5. I had finally made a proof of concept to an investment group and only 10 of the 20 were onboard with the game design. Some of that was the 18+ label but almost every one of the 20 stated that using Unity 5…especially…Unity 5…for a large type HD 3D game was simply asking for trouble and too risky. They were specific to mention that if this proof of concept demo was done in UE4 that I would have got the investment needed for the development.
Personally…I stuck with Unity 5 when it hit 5.2.2 and was really stable and they solved a number of issues from the earlier development releases. Unity 5.4 is really solid and a pleasure…but…Unity Technologies continues to evade the internal issues to their engine. There are a number of hacks and work-arounds that must be done for things that ‘should’ work in code but don’t or do things strangely. I had to take a very explicit route in my C# code to make darn sure that the engine was not going to bite me in the tush at every upgrade…and it does anyhow…simply mitigated heavily by very strict coding standards. Most in the Unity fan section have horrible coding standards and their stuff is breaking constantly…badly. Which means the Unity Asset Store has A LOT of products that are in constant development status or broken or left at a particular version. I completely had to stop trying to integrate asset store developers’ tools and only use the really good ones as a learning experience and code my own in my own standards for that robustness. This is a very frustrating process. Now that Unity 5.5 is out I updated my project and it is once again broken with 124 red flags that need to be resolved. Somewhere in that 1.5millon lines of code these needs to be read and figured out. It was much worse going from 5.2.2 to 5.4…took me just over 2 weeks to get all the compiling fails and custom shader issues resolved.
One the same note…the only update I had trouble with in UE4 is recently…4.13 to 4.14. The project was corrupt and nothing I could do to get it running on the transfer. This project was created in 4.7! So…fine…love the new additions to 4.14 and I really needed to clean some sh** up and get rid of hanging references because I moved things around in UE4…which UE4 does NOT like at all :D. UE4 does take a beefier rig to get things done…my rig is still less than $1k USD and it is very potent…runs Skyrim fully HD heavily modded and almost anything else is Ultra. UE4 runs beautifully and never crashes. A very good experience.
So recently because of Unity 2017 coming in March…Unity has lost another lifetime Pro perpetual license holder. I get to keep my current Pro license at the level prior to when Unity 2017 is changed but there is only a couple of things I will be using it for at this point…Gaia Heightmaps and Splatmaps (via the excellent stamping system) and quickly testing some prototypes since my coding is all in place for very fast testing of concepts (I am getting better at this sort of thing in UE4 as well…so this feature may just go away too). Unity Tech is insane thinking that Unity is a better value than UE4 (main competitor) then charge us Pro people double. Actually it is 4x because they offer ‘Pay to Own’ now which is 2 years sub =>Required<=…here is the ultra rub…If you ‘Pay to Own’ = ‘Current Perpetual’ then IF/WHEN you STOP the subscription you KEEP your license with NO future updates. Ummmmm…THAT is what I have to do NOW. My updates for Unity Cycle has been $750 ($1500 for the first Pro license) and I get to KEEP the license where it ENDED. So I have Unity 4.7 and Unity 5.5 (current). So…WHY pay $3,000 additional for much of the same? I just do not ‘get’ it. Enough of this ramble.
In any case. I have always been happy with UE4 but this engine always seemed to require more than what one person could handle on their own. With some serious workflows I have gotten UE4 to a manageable level but it still does not feel comfortable with a one man show. Unity 4.7 is but does not have the necessary ‘stuff’ that is needed for a HD 3D game…close…but not there. Unity 5 is supposed to be that but it is really comfortable working as a one man show. There are things it does automatically or has ‘things’ in place that help do things nicely right within the engine. UE4…not so. Think APEX Cloth for UE4…or animating blendshapes with little performance hit…are both great examples. There is no animosity to the Unity engine on my part but the decisions being made by its creators are very strange. It is what it is. A tough pill to swallow really.
In the end I am really happy this happened. I fiddled in UE4 a ton since 4.4 but now am into re-building what I had in 4.14…and loving it.
On a side note…for any Unity 5 peeps reading…I have some super high quality and free stuff for Unity 5 as well as very honest observations of working in both of these engines…and this is coming from one who is very adept at NWN1 & 2 toolset development, excellent at Skyrim modding, and some Fallout 4 modding.
My web site page for Unity stuff by me. http://standsurestudio.com/index.php/unity
If you “brick” your project with C++, recovery should be as easy as “git stash; rebuild,” right?
If you “wait forever for lighting builds,” then make all lights dynamic/movable and lightmass has nothing to do.
Ye well, count me under those. I am using it since version 2. Many of those veterans are still beginners actually, other than fiddling around with a bit of C# and the engine for some years.
The pricing model surely is bogus, for my situation at least, but that does not diminish the engine and its capabilities itself.
I prefer Unreal in a lot of ways to Unity, but the thing that makes me stick to Unity for some projects is the fact that it feels more stable in many scenarios and code iteration can be lot faster.
In my day job I use both C# and C++ so that is not a compelling enough argument to disregard either engine, no professional programmer would actually.
Your argument earlier was that Unity makes it so easy it draws you away from knowledge. But the exact opposite argument can also be made; Unity actually misses a good set of tools that Unreal does have.
Those tools you would have to create yourself in Unity, thus gaining valuable knowledge. In Unreal you already have them, no knowledge gained.
Concerning Ogre etc; many companies actually prefer in-depth knowledge of either Unity or UE4 rather than a framework such as Ogre. Being a competent programmer is a requirement for pretty much all, you don’t need Ogre for that.
Dropping either engine in a heartbeat should skillset and project requirements. I can drop Unity in one project and decide Unreal is totally useless in the other, for example.
What less functionality? The free version has the exact same toolset for game creation as its counterparts. And Unreal offers also just about everything you need, and then some.
Your point being?
Pirating happens everywhere and the Asset store is just part of their eco-system. Many studios, small and large, still make their own custom tooling.
Over half of our Unity tools are custom made. Many developers make their own tools.
Has a bigger community maybe? I don’t know. I mean when you ask what engine to use on any game dev website most people will say Unity for Beginners. I think all game engines are pretty changeling when you’re just starting you have to learn the basics. I don’t like to get into what engine is better and to use visual coding or not it just gets some people all riled up. I made that mistakes asking on a Blender website for using Python or Logic Bricks and people just got into arguments back and forth. I just say use what you like what you think is best and what runs on your computer lol.
Maybe i’m wrong now but when I tried to make a first person shooter with unity a few years ago I had to do way more programming just to make something like a ue4 shooter template so id say ue4 seems to be quicker in building things than unity.
that’s because Unity is always rebuilding the lighting in real time when you add objects. I built an Island project for University with it and changes to terrain, or moving around things that cast shadows took forever.
I am so glad I did not buy unity pro per platform back in the day for like $5k or whatever it was for pc + mobile. That has got to suck.
Unity has raised a ton of investment money and now they are going to have to raise revenue and growth to go . Probably even more and more price changes coming down the pipeline as they figure out how to do that.
I have used Unity for some weird reason it feels really nice to use. Unity was the first engine I used, I think it has this stigma of being more friendly for Indie devs. When most people think of building games they’ll think of Unity. I’ve been with Unreal since the UDK days, pretty much fell in love with it and I just used it ever since. I would argue that UE4 is no harder to learn than Unity.
So I started off learning Unity and 2D design last month, today I have decided that I cannot do art. But if I am to build a game I need to do everything, but one dive into the world of 2D art you realize just how impossible it can be. For example you need to have a mind for detail like shadow and lighting and the other thing where the art can be simple yet engaging.
For me I have closed off that chapter in my life, there is no easy fix even pixel art 2D retro is incredibly difficult to accomplish near impossible actually unless you are born with some talent. The Unity and 2D chapter is over for me, time to move on.
I have come to UE4 now, it is my hope that I will be competent at 3D modeling as animating it should be much easier than redrawing each frame in 2D and it is my hope that UE4 will be able to cast the lighting and shadows automatically.
Actually it is supposed to do it I would think but a friend asked me why not just do the 3D in Unity, well honestly if you looked at the lighting in UE4 its mind blowing, since I suck at art maybe the baked lighting in UE4 would help my crappy art look a little better who knows.
Plus texturing in 3D is easier you just use the material feature and you can find tons of it online.
I want to create a 2.5D platformer something like Super Metroid or new Super Mario on the Wii U.
I often ask myself how possible is this to even begin with?
Epic can beat Unity’s popularity very easily.
They have 5 million to spread for development funds, right?
Hand out 1000 usd to all of 5000 developer that puts a game on greenlight and gets greenlit, using UE4.
As simple as that. There can be many small indie games completed with 1000 usd budget.
Instead of this mysterious waiting game of getting a response from “Unreal Dev Grants”
It baffles me that Epic is giving away Development Grants and people has not migrated in flocks to UE4 from Unity.
Perhaps, as a company Epic has some sort of “trust” issue among developers.
I’ve always been a big fan of Unreal Engine and Epic Games, and has been using it since UT99 days and I would never imaged Unity to surpass UE in popularity, but it happened. Epic should really give a thought about this, from a different perspective, not just “C++ vs. C#” discussions.
Oh, this is just an invitation for abusement.
It indeed will summon thousands of people, but… It will just kill a greenlight which is already struggling with quality content and voting manipulations.
Also from complete outsider perspective it might look like a scam - spend $100 for having a chance to get $1000 with underlying popularity contest which is gamed by websites who is reselling cheap games keys for votes on Greenlight and etc
Nope; many people rather see hell freeze than switch from C# to C++…
They also believe Blueprints are exactly like PlayMaker, which it’s not.
Also there tons of “prefabs” they buy from asset store and they simply can’t leave behind all that ‘patrimony’.
The only way the lazy people would switch is if they could automatically port their Unity C# scripts to UE4, and that is of course impractical and silly expectations…