Why is Unity the most popular engine?

Development Cinematics & Media
67

Unity did bet on the mobile market and won big, so no surprise is so popular nowdays. Also it still is very mobile friendly. I am willing to bet however that will quickly feel the heat from Unreal , if it has not already felt it.

By the way its good news that Unity is more popular, that means that Epic developers will try harder to improve Unreal. Being on the top is a guarantee for feature freeze , or slow down to the development, relevant examples are Microsoft and Autodesk. This why countries try to fight monopolies as much as they can.

So I am definitely not eager to see Unreal get the crown. Second place is great place to be :smiley:

68

I don’t know where people got the idea that Unity is easier for beginners, unless they’re talking about beginners who already have a solid grasp of programming. Having virtually no experience with programming, and having tried learning Unity first, and then UE4, I can safely say that UE4’s blueprint system alone makes it nearly orders of magnitude faster and easier to for a compete beginner to develop a game that it would be in Unity.

69

Unreal Engine became easier to use in the last 2 years.
Unity developers (or just users who build nothing anyway) just didn’t realize that yet. Unity was easier because both EpicGames and CryTek was focused on closed studio developers only.
Today UE4 is much easier to build a full game than Unity, you just have to give yourself enough time to learn the many many tools it provides and how to use them well… I’ve worked on games for PC and PS4 with developers who are ex Unity users and even though they have year long experienced UE4 users, many are still attached to the Unity mindset and fall to many mistakes while working on UE4 because of old workflow vices. One of those there was a very bad situation where I tried to advice against certain patterns and they felt insulted, I just had to leave and the code base there is still broken lol

70

I believe so too.

71

Unity is used widely by thousand of people and companies to make mobile games for older and new devices.

72

You may be interested in this graph of Unity’s number of registered users:

unity-registered-developers.png
unity-registered-developers.png760×270 3.48 KB

73

Registered users means nothing. You can have a product that has no active users but has millions of registered users. The metric is useless for the average person, and Companies release metrics like this to trick people into thinking it matters. The graph you want is Active Registered Users, which will never be released.

Vanity Metrics are not in anyway helpful or indicative of anything, because they can be easily corruptible. Not to mention they are metrics that have no real use other than to look good hence the name vanity metric.

74

Well I suppose the whole point was that nobody should be persuaded to believe Unity has thousands of users. I never considered active vs. inactive registered users. It doesn’t really matter to me, now that I think about it, though. Nothing surprising about a large company misrepresenting itself for profit, though, either.

75

Ehhhhh… Blueprint is a visual programming language.

Blueprints are code and if you create them you are a coder.

Blueprint is actually very close to a text programming language in form and difficult.

76

Zarkopafilis, please don’t write nonsense. If you really only saw “flappy bird clones” made with Unity, the problem is not Unity, but you not being informed. If you look at current AAA games in development using Unity (or the current demo by Unity Technologies) it’s just as jaw-dropping as the best demos you would see with UE4. The reason? Both use all types of PBR and modern lighting mechanics. If you can do it with UE4 and not with Unity 5, then the problem is not the devkit you are using, but the lack of knowledge/skill you personally have with a specific devkit.

Being a professional user of Unity for many years AS WELL as UE4 since it’s release, I can only say that the only real (!) difference I see is that (a) UE4 is much younger and therefore less complete than Unity, and (b) that UE4 supporters are usually more arrogant than Unity supporters.

What bothers me most is people attacking the Unity Asset Store. People always claim that it is so bad because you have to buy stuff (while UE4 is desperately trying to get more people to work for THEIR marketplace themselves). See it that way: there’s tons of valuable stuff on the Unity marketplace you get for nearly free. Paying $50 for something an entire sub-team would waste half a year on is actually SUPERB. The statements that many assets are badly documented and not supported is simply not true. Of course you have light and shadow everywhere but the premium packages are extremely well supported and are being continuously improved. Epic nor Unity Technologies could afford that many coders to implement it all into the engine, for Unity it’s literally tens of thousands of people who contribute - having the option to include entire blocks of functionality that you need at a ridiculous low price is invaluable.

77

That’s a nice speech, but it’s all anecdote, and in fact there’s a plethora of simply wrong information in your text. I do not know whether the root of your wrong statements is conscious lies or the fact that you are simply not trained well enough, but e.g. stating that the main reason for developers to pay for Unity Pro is to hide the splash screen is as wrong is it possibly could be. I am giving you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don’t know better.

Btw., just because the most popular game engine was used to make many non-AAA games, it doesn’t mean that (a) you can’t use it to make an AAA game and (b) that UE4 is in any way better. If you look through both devkit’s game lists you will find great titles (visually and gameplay-wise) and a lot of ****. Your perception of Unity might be worse due to the huge amount of rather not complex games on the mobile market which UE4 still did not manage to really conquer. But that, nevertheless, doesn’t make it more than a perception and is not an indication of the potential quality of games created with Unity.

78

I have a radical idea: metrics aside, those who prefer Unity can use that to make games, and those who would rather use UE4 can use that instead. Probably an insane suggestion, I’m sure, but sometimes that’s the way to go…

79

One thing to keep in mind is that Unreal did not go completely free until March 2nd of 2015.
For many people UE4 was not even in the consideration until that moment, whereas Unity had been free for quite awhile.
This gives Unity a head start as far as indie adoptance goes, however as we have seen since UE4 went free the growth rate has been incredible.

Given that it started much later but appears to be growing faster I would say that in enough time UE4 might get to a point where it almost rivals Unity in terms of users.

80

I’m pretty sure Unity got traction because they jumped on mobile very quickly. Back in 2010, Unity was nowhere near as polished as it is today. At that time it was a struggle, however it was the only show in town to get on iOS.

Once Unreal cracks the mobile nut, I think there will be a big shift.

81

This is true. Unity’s quarterly releases say how many monthly active users there are. I believe the last one I read suggested over a million. I would not be surprised if Unreal was already similar (quality over quantity, so to speak…).

82

You use Unity professionally for many years and and conclude that UE4 is less complete because it is “younger”? Did you actually use UE4 for a significant amount of time? Or Unity for that matter…
Because seriously…

83

I am not sure if anybody has used UE4 for a significant amount of time, as it is “young”. We have used it for two commercial projects which both turned out to be quite tedious due to us having to develop many components by ourselves. While we could achieve anything we wanted (of course, it’s straight-forward C++ and you can mess with anything), we would invest far more development time than scheduled based on our Unity experience. (And, mind me, we hired a couple of really talented C++ guys on top.) This year, UE4 was one option for as many as 6 commercial projects (most of them VR-projects outside of the gaming industry) and in the end none of the project teams chose to go with UE4. 5 teams would go with Unity, one is extending an in-house solution.

And yes, UE4 is “younger” and therefore Epic devs as well as third parties didn’t have a whole lot of time to extend the kit beyond the basics (and then some), while the Unity team had more time to learn, adopt, extend - plus of course the tons of valuable assets you can buy for literally nothing. Not all of these assets are gold, but we regularly save hundreds of development days by utilizing/extending one of the great libraries. I understand that hobby coders will not have the funds to do so (but then, they also do not have the time to invest many man-years in developing the same functionality by themselves), and I understand that huge studios with hundreds of devs can invest in developing all functionality by themselves; yet we, as a mid-sized studio, can only invest the majority of our budget in the actual content / mechanics / (game) logic.

Nevertheless, so many statements in this Unreal (!) forums are simply wrong. Stating that UE4 looks better simply means that the specific author didn’t bother to look at Unity for years; if you e.g. use Substance Designer (which apparently >85% of the studios do), your substances will look the same in both kits. Stating that Unity is inferior because it doesn’t have a material editor built in natively is simply whining. You can choose between several AAA material editor solutions from the asset store for a couple of dollars. Stating that UE4 is a game engine while Unity 5 is not … well, I am not even going into that … good joke. Stating that Unity is for beginners while UE4 is for professionals is wrong too - the only complex thing about game development is happening deep inside your code logic, and that’s the same because you need to build the same. Claiming that C++ is so much more complex than C# makes me yawn. If you coded less than 20 years in C++ and less than 10 years in C# you should be in professional game development anyway. And if you did, both is straight-forward and really not that hard. Oh, and another favorite statement is that in Unity you need to code a ton of tools before you can actually start … wrong too. You might pick up a dozen useful helpers from the Asset Store, you hook up your repository system, and you are good to go. Anything you might adjust on the way (e.g. your own layouts, etc.) can be transferred to your other projects easily. Anybody stating you need to develop tools might have (a) not understood the concepts, or (b) might not have spent an hour in the tools section of the Asset Store to pick out a couple of goodies. Final favourite wrong statement: UE4 blueprints make UE4 so much superior to Unity. Just look at the Asset Store again: there’s several (!) node base visual scripting tools made by industry veterans that will make you cry happy tears. Just pick what fits your development/design style best, and even adjust/extend the code if needed.

Ultimately, it only comes down to how quickly you can achieve what your bosses / producers ordered, in a stable way. Looking at UE4 - basically at ANY component of game dev - you are always looking at a mountain of manual work you need to do … UI, AI (behavior trees, etc.), whatever. The reason is not that Epic devs wouldn’t have a good concepts or “forgot” to add it. I am sure many of these things are written down on tiny to-do-stickers on some Product Managers backlog board. It’s simply that UE4 in it’s current form is not on the market since a long time, and that’s why it will take time for Epic to include it. After they did: knock yourself off with any devkit you want to use (in the end 99% of your projects quality will depend on your talent, skill and creativity anyway), and until then pick your battle wisely. Your wrong assumption of “UE4 looks better” might cost you thousands of hours more in development.

84

I use UE4 and Unity both professionally and as hobby. I am with you that Unity is a very capable game engine indeed and that many of the differences come from the fact that most developers don’t know how to play to the strengths or weaknesses of both engines. However if you want to make statements of which is the more complete engine I feel a better starting point is the base engine, without plugins from either asset store/market place.
Although UE4 is a relatively young engine, much of the core tools and code have roots in the previous iterations of UE3/UDK. It is not entirely as young as you seem to think.

What features does Unity have to make it more complete?

85

no way ! How could such a thing ever works ?! :smiley:

more seriously, I agree that arguing about objective specs advantage is sometimes the worst metrics to explain human nature choices.

86

You are of course absolutely right stating that if you look at the bare bone base system, Unity is hardly more complete than UE4, although I will say that I consider uGUI and extend-ability of the editor as well as many Integrated Services of Unity superior to anything else, e.g. Unity Ads, Everyplay, Unity Multiplayer, Analytics, Cloud Build, Performance Reporting and Premium Support. Plus the number of potential target platforms is higher in Unity. For me it’s really only important what tools/code/library/functionality we can access if needed. As long as the quality and documentation is acceptable, we will not truly make a difference between core part of the engine or great asset by a third party as both approaches allow us to get things done in a fast yet stable way. Still, you are right when you only look at the base engine.