[HN Gopher] Unreal vs. Unity Opinion
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Unreal vs. Unity Opinion
Author : ibobev
Score : 64 points
Date : 2022-04-17 21:10 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gist.github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gist.github.com)
| rektide wrote:
| This speaks sooo close to the trends that pushed Microsoft to go
| create WSL, to become a viable healthy platform for multi-
| platform development: they had to. They had to create a platform
| people could use as they wanted to, had to support something that
| takes upstream pull requests. Simply shipping Ubuntu is basically
| the biggest possible fix they had for long term development,
| going where the puck is headed.
|
| This discussion about whether a game engine is long-term
| supportable, whether it invests back in the gamedev, it parallels
| the conversation about development-experience in operating
| systems so closely.
| golergka wrote:
| I've worked as professional Unity developer for 8 years after
| learning it as a hobbyist for 3, and I'm happy to finally be rid
| of it. It's good for prototypes and beginners, sure. But when you
| start to build big projects, you learn that al those learning
| resources guide you towards using awful architectural practices,
| and that there's a million of edge cases and weird bugs that
| would absolutely kill your project but will stay unfixed for
| years.
|
| Also, since ~2015, Unity as a company have been more and more
| interested in developing shiny prototypes of new features that
| would look great in presentations, but it would take forever to
| finally get them to be production ready, and they would be rid
| with problems even then. It's as if Unity cared more about
| increasing numbers of newcomers than retain old-timers and
| studios which already invested heavily into the engine.
|
| But I have to be honest, if you're doing mobile 2d game
| development, want to ship a product on both operating systems and
| don't want to invest in building your own game engine, it is
| still the best option. There are other solutions, but none have
| such an incredible amount of tools and assets.
| theThreeTuples wrote:
| Unreal licensing is crazy compared to Unity. A % of revenue is
| millions of dollars potentially. You cant compare that to the
| fixed opex per developer seat with unity. It's a strategic design
| for a company to use one or the other. So far in all companies
| I've worked for and have consulted for attribute their choice to
| cost and ease of hiring.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >>U nreal licensing is crazy compared to Unity. A % of revenue
| is millions of dollars potentially
|
| Sure but how many studios reach that level? And wouldn't you
| agree that by then, having to pay that share of revenue would
| be, as the saying goes, "a great problem to have"?
|
| IMO it makes more sense to focus on developer productivity
| because that drastically increases your chance of reaching
| those revenue numbers.
| doikor wrote:
| Big publishers/game developers just negotiate a custom
| contract. But yes in general UE is more expensive then Unity
| but it also comes with a bunch of useful stuff like quixel mega
| scans for free if you are using the engine.
|
| https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/license
| sidlls wrote:
| To underscore the sibling comment: at the point where a "% of
| revenue is millions of dollars" the company can easily afford
| to invest in an in-house solution if it's that important for
| their revenue goals. The tradeoff is hiring a sufficient number
| of skilled game engine programmers to make that work. It's not
| cheap.
| doikor wrote:
| Also it is not just making a game engine but you also have to
| build some kind of a editor, script/animation tooling, plug-
| in support, etc.
|
| Basically if you are big enough that you can make your own
| engine the engine also has to be usable by non programmers
| making the actual content for your game.
| suyash wrote:
| It's actually much better for indie developers because it's
| completely free to build and ship something and see if market
| wants to before worrying about subscription costs etc like in
| Unity.
| klodolph wrote:
| You only pay for Unity if you already have >100K in annual
| revenue.
| DerSaidin wrote:
| so TL;DR of this gist...
|
| > > what is the point of Unity, now?
|
| > Unity was good for prototyping. Access to Unreal engine source
| is great.
|
| Doesn't sound they are making much of an argument to redeem
| Unity.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| What is the learning curve on UE like? Unity took some time but
| it seemed reasonable for the tiny game I made.
|
| Also, is UE something to consider for 2D games? Or is Godot more
| the pick there?
| BudaDude wrote:
| For 2D, Godot is the best in the game right now.
| peppertree wrote:
| The problem statement was unity projects are hard to maintain due
| to accumulation of tech debt. The answer is to give dev engine
| source access... I failed to see the connection here.
| rektide wrote:
| A platform which takes input, which is participatory, is
| probably going to do much better about the core thesis (in bold
| on the article):
|
| > _As impressive as UE5 is, I don 't think the technology has
| to do with its appeal as much as the long-term user
| experience._
|
| I agree there's not a ton of explanation & support for this
| point. The post does jump to a very specific topic, whether the
| source is open / takes PRs. For sure there's a lot more that
| goes into this question. The post explicitly says it leaves
| others to deal with a lot of the pain of the back-half of Unity
| development, so it's not even like there's a ton of winning
| moves UE has to play: they just have to not self-inflict
| grevious wounds.
|
| It is, however- unsaid in the article but clear- incredibly
| much easier to keep yourself in a respectable, easy to use
| shape when you are open source. The post talks about a specific
| bug, but just things like improving the build toolchain or
| adding support for some new developer tool: developers will
| happily improve their quality of life in a product, if you let
| them.
| dleslie wrote:
| I've worked with Unreal and Unity both, professionally and for
| many years. Several triple A games, indie titles, commercial
| sims, and social experiences. What sets unity apart by leaps and
| bounds is its asset store, community and educational materials.
| rendall wrote:
| Which do you like working with, better?
| dleslie wrote:
| They both have different irritations, but for most things I
| would still recommend unity.
|
| Much of the long-project pain with Unity comes from its
| biggest limitation, in comparison to Unreal: no source, and
| so you're stuck with Unity's default behavior, limitations
| and bugs, unless you plan on extending it, wrapping it or
| replacing it. Whereas Unreal making source available doesn't
| lend itself to safe boundaries and compartmentalization.
|
| Weirdly, Unity's irritation is also something of a strength,
| because those wrappers and replacements tend to find
| themselves on the asset store, often for peanuts. Often with
| source.
|
| There's serious differences at the extremes, of course. But
| unless you're working with eight, ten, or more figures of
| budget I don't think it will matter that Unreal has superior
| tech in numerous ways, because you won't have the teams of
| artists to make use of it.
| leetrout wrote:
| Doesnt unity Just Work(tm) with git, too?
| thurn wrote:
| At one point in the past, Unity had a legendary commitment to
| backwards compatibility, but that's gone now (maybe their
| internal promotion process rewards shipping new features over
| everything else?).
|
| Old Unity would never have shipped a fiasco like URP. They'd have
| figured out a way to make incremental migration possible instead
| of having a global setting... I refuse to believe this would even
| be particularly difficult.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Is Godot out of the question? Is it mostly a performance thing?
| suyash wrote:
| for me would be lack of AR/VR support as that is what I want to
| build apps/games for.
| tonguez wrote:
| unity always required that you use a mouse to manually drag and
| drop certain things in its GUI interface (prefabs), and this is
| intolerable to people who feel like their entire project should
| be storable in simple (text) files. otherwise what are you
| supposed to do, take screenshots of the state of the editor when
| everything is dragged and dropped into the right place? it's so
| bizarre
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