Actually Unity is more user friendly because it is simpler. You have just a couple of windows and that is all. In UE4 you have much more windows to work with. That is not a bad thing though but it makes it more complicated.
Unreal makes significantly higher revenue compared to Unity last I checked…while being “less popular”. Popularity doesn’t mean much when Unreal is absolutely dominating Unity in commercial use. To me, this means that Unreal is more efficient and functional compared to Unity, otherwise Unity would be the engine dominating lists like Top 100 on Steam. They’re not.
It’s more “complicated” because it has more functionality. Much like Photoshop is more complicated than MS Paint…though it’s just as easy to draw lines and boxes in both applications. Unity becomes just as complicated, if not more so, once you are dealing with loads of 3rd party spaghetti code (Assets) integrated into your Editor to fill all of the gaps.
They’re not in the same market. If you look at mobile games, you’ll find almost every game out there is running on unity.
They’re not in the same market. If you look at mobile games, you’ll find almost every game out there is running on unity.
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“We think that Unreal Engine’s market share is double the nearest competitor in revenues,” Sweeney said. “This is despite the fact that Unity has more users. This is by virtue of the fact that Unreal is focused on the high end. More games in the top 100 on Steam in revenue are Unreal, more than any other licensable engine competitor combined.”
Unreals Lineage II: Revolution on Mobile made $176M in the first month. People act as if Unreal is useless for mobile.
They do indeed compete in the same markets. Popularity does not necessarily equate to more revenue or profits.
Very interesting. I never really thought that there is a market for high end mobile games.
Well, Unreal can’t compete with Unity on mobile, that’s a fact. Unity was born on mobile. I’m not saying Unreal is useless on mobile, neither is Unity on high-end.
Talking about revenue numbers? Well, Pokemon Go was made with Unity and did $1 billion in just over six months:
I think both engines are great in the hands of skilled developers.
And what does that matter if the engine only costs $1500 per year per seat or w/e.
$1B over 6 months for Pokemon Go is not Unity’s revenue.
It’s not that UE4 is getting a lot out of $500million or $1billion revenue of any game developed by big software houses that pay the custom license which like UDK should be anything between $500,000 and $2million per year. And I doubt that Epic Games is getting 5% from those too. Then as per market share Epic Games with UE4 how many big software houses with AAA games that make a lot of money could be getting money from? With many of those creating their own 3D engine surely never not enough.
For Epic Games to not care about small software houses and single freelancer developers of true indie games they should get custom license payment from 60% to 80% of all major software houses developing AAA games then. Otherwise in the long run their business model won’t work as they might think if they don’t get a large percentage of small developers on which they can collect 5% royalties and get money from selling assets on the marketplace… that is just what Unity kept doing for years and how they made a lot of money to become bigger than competitors.
Epic Games should care more about the smaller ones otherwise having made UE4 almost free won’t make any sense if they just keep looking at big software houses paying the expensive custom licenses and that’s it while competitors keep collecting money and increasing market share from the smaller ones.
If you cite Pokemon’s success or games like Hearthstone you need to consider the natural audience outreach based on the title history, or the company behind it. If you look at Battlegrounds, they made something with Unreal and basically did this all from scratch, they just delivered a very solid gameplay experience. And while many may have picked Unity in the past because of titles like HS for example, with new hyped titles developed with Unreal, there is likely more interest for development rising too.
And what does this mean, most popular, by audience reception, gross revenue, or number of developers, titles published, assets on the market, job postings is not an accurate measure.
In my opinion it really doesn’t matter, you can make great games with both engines. And then the fact you have to pay for the professional Unity version. I rather buy assets from that money. Today, I also consider Unreal Engine to be more capable when it comes to graphics, something which wasn’t initially a decision factor.
That is actually a plus on Unity side - from a developers standpoint. If that game would be made with Unreal - the developer would pay them a fortune. Actually in my opinion 5% royalties in Unreal is one of the biggest cons of this engine. I dislike royalties with passion. Imagine you make an art in Photoshop and you need to pay them 5% of what you get by selling it. Unreal is the most expensive game engine available for third party developers.
There is also another thing why Unity is so popular and that is wast amounts of knowledge on the internet and rich pool of assets you can get from the asset store. You can say that these assets don’t play nicely with each other and that is fair enough but I don’t believe you can take an asset and be happy how it works. Small teams usually buy an asset because they don’t know exactly how to tackle a particular problem and one they are comfortable with how it works they refactor it so it fits their architecture. BTW there are a lot of high quality assets on the Unity asset store that bring a lot of value that need no modification whatsoever.
Unreal have it’s strengths - no doubt about that. Both engines are great and offer some different things for a developer. Like I said Unity wins on mobile, Unreal wins on high-end with VR being a tie at the moment.
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…the developer would pay them a fortune. Actually in my opinion 5% royalties in Unreal is one of the biggest cons of this engine./QUOTE]
If you make 1B or even a million and have to give 5% back, then this is fair, it also benefits you in return, because you pay the constructor of the software, enabling your project in the first place.
Sadly, 30% to game stores, that something that we can’t avoid no matter what engine we use.
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Yeah, you can look at it like you’ve said. If you pay for Unity Pro you pay the constructor of the software as well but the fee is flat no matter what success you’ll achieve. Personally I prefer permanent licenses - one time fee to own a particular major version of a software.
EDIT: If Unreal 4 series would cost $1000 I would buy it probably.
Also consider that not everyone can spend $1000, and a large community is also what drives a product. Because it generates more options. Adobe became so popular because early on their software was copied all over the internet (There are studies on this). Basically what Photoshop did at the time was to create a copy of AMIGAs Deluxe Paint. Today Adobe has a very high priced business model, yielding alternatives like Blender in the process, at least in part because of this. To counter this law, Adobe aggressively works to just buy out alternatives. In my opinion pay to play (in order to create) models are dated, and the time of Adobe, Apple, with their protected, restricted concepts is really coming to an end. Unity can only exist so far since they offer a streamlined version, have a solid and active user base.
Unreal is likely to gain more market shares in future years, the product is becoming wider adopted, and more user friendly - sophisticated. Unity and Unreal will likely continue to coexist and benefit from each other in future years. If Unreal would require a $1000 it would result in a disadvantage, driving users to alternatives, meaning less market assets, because it would become more niche etc etc.
Yup, it’s good that you can use Unreal for free if you are making less than $3000 per quarter. Same with Unity if you make less than $100000 per year - use it for free.
Not really. Unity’s licensing terms are pretty clear that whilst there is a free license, you’re getting a limited version of the software. Unity don’t even give source access with their top-licensing option, you have to request it separately.
Care to elaborate about this? Part of my team is using Unity free and we have one Pro license and do not see anything limited on the free version apart from dark editor skin. I would love to know what are the limitations.
You don’t get any of the cloud tools or analytics in the free version, and you can’t build for other platforms (Android, iOS, Windows Store, consoles etc).
The biggest killer for me is that you don’t get source code access, I can’t imagine trying to work without it.
That info is many years out of date.
There is a splash screen on the personal edition though.
It’s not really C# as in using OpenTK or developing an app with C# though is it? It’s a component based architecture that happens to use C# (and Java err script? Unityscript?), Lumberyard is also doing the same with “entities” although it’s based around LUA / C++.
That’s the bit that makes it poweful / flexible and quick IMO, you can esentially moth code (bounce back and forth making sure it works in no time at all)… I’ve noticed due to the game framework in UE / BP’s it’s simpler to initially get something off the ground.
When you start tackling more advanced concepts the lack of documentation / tutorials etc. starts to show, Unity has a massive user base in which most problems you come across someone else will have an answer for it and that’s not an engine issue (bar the doc’s) it’s simply because Unity is older in this iteration. Also Unity rarely ever changes, even if it does it appears to be minor things like GetComponent and it tells you near enough exactly what to replace it with.
Plus I know we keep looking at the asset store as a “bad thing” but there are some very well designed systems out there that correctly add niche / deeper functionality than you can get in most engines. Also just to note I find Unity far quicker in most day to day activities, compilation, shaders and letting the GI spin whilst you do other stuff etc… Also it doesn’t require you to have a small supercomputer to get things moving, we use workstations here (14 core Xeon, 64GB RAM, GTX 1080, SSD’s)… UE still takes ages to do stuff, if I batch import materials I just walk off for an hour or so.
Someone mentioned graphically those screenies would be better in UE4, I’ve been using UE a while and whilst this might be lack of knowledge on my part if you remove Lightmass out the equation (for bigger / openworld games) I can’t get UE to look as good as Unity and it’s a far cry from CE / LY…
The issue I’ve always found with Unity is taking a prototype (which is very simple to do if not slightly verbose due to lack of decent features) and turning it into a polished game. UE is far better at it and irrelevant of graphics (which doesn’t matter if you can’t release a game at an acceptible quality anyway) you’re not going to suffer scalability issues (if you’re an indie) neither do you have to wait for Epic to fix a last minute issue if it affects your release.
This is the thing, whilst I don’t think access to source is the solution to all problems (especially for an indie) at least if you hit a wall there’s something you can do about it and that’s the issue I have with Unity… I like it as an engine and at it’s core what it is, can’t say I trust it that much holistically and the amount of workarounds for their systems is silly.
We talk a lot about source code access, toolsets, graphics, peformance, cost etc. etc. and if that’s the case why are we not all using Amazon Lumberyard? I’ve not come across an engine that consitantly (indoor / outdoor etc.) that looks as good (bar CE of course), it’s far more performant than any other engine I’ve used, which comes with the most toolsets and it costs nothing.
Maybe something to do with it being a somewhat painful blackbox of an experience to do much? (although Amazon are improving this and it’s “getting there”)…