Open letter to Unity...

^ This. I've seen a similar vibe. Unity's status plummeted from 'no-brainer' to 'not-so-brainy'. As Hippo observed, people voice their concerns, get no response, and then vote with their wallets.

Gigi.

 

Yeah that's a weird thing to say. Why would you be crazy for trying another engine? Depending on your team's needs, it might be better one or another, but it really depends on you. Only weird thing about it is to post about it on unity forum and expect no one to think differently (aka the trolls you're referring to I suppose).

 

Pretty much sums up my experiences.

I've a strong desire to make something in it, but there are "things" that feel like roadblocks at the moment. The sprites (gizmos) are annoyingly hard to set up so they're not in the way (especially in blueprint component view), and lightmass - nice results when it doesn't get a beef on, but the light system (as opposed to lighting) itself is surprisingly limited. But the things that *do* work are brilliant... I'd not be ashamed of copying them verbatim. The sub editors in particular -- even the Mesh editor alone is a godsend.

And of course there's performance - it's impossible to escape the fact that this is a high end engine built for future proofing. I don't think anyone will be able to make fair comparisons until Unity 5 comes out, at which point an awful lot of attention is going to be on UT's PBR. I'm not sure if that's a good thing, as there's more to a good middleware than pretty next gen graphics, but I guess you can't hide from the inevitable forever.

 

Also worth noting, AAA studio people generally aren't the best people to get an opinion from regarding Unity and indie developers because, well, most of them are biased towards Unreal and AAA developers. "Industry standard" AAA engine and all that. I highly doubt these AAA studios use Unity for their major projects so I wouldn't have really expected them to say anything different.
I have a number of friends (both who work in the AAA sector and not) who said the exact same thing about Unity being in big trouble back when UDK was first released. Obviously that did not happen. They've gradually become convinced, especially after seeing some of the stuff I've done in Unity, but it's taken a very long time for them to recognize Unity at all. So take whatever the AAA people have to say about Unity with a massive block of salt.

 

Why think that? I've 10 years in this industry, seen multiple studios, and connect to hundreds. Some AAA companies use Unity, some Indie's use AAA engines, and some groups still role their own.

Gigi

 

I have the feeling many folks consider all the AAA releases in unreal engine, and imagine the 'make AAA' button is going to be there somewhere. Even if it comes with pre-made AAA features, it will only result in games that look similar.
The particle system looks great in UE4, but it also seems like I've seen some of those particles many times in other games, I think one of the examples are straight from hawken, and don't get me wrong.. they look great on hawken...

But I'd hate to see it get old and over-used. To really make something new you'd have to get your hands dirty and do some degree of coding... in the end it's no different than scripting legacy particles in Unity.

On top of it the verdict for UE4 so far seems to be "some things still lacking", and other miscellaneous annoying things... and this is mid-hype observations, imagine after the love is gone, and more time to find bugs, and the broom doesn't sweep so clean.

I think this is a time for waiting, too many new things and uncertainties. I rather wait and check out unity 5,than start with new learning curves.

 

One thing I've seen is that people that have used it and don't like it because it doesn't have the niche assets you can buy in the asset store yet. Plus if you are using javascript or C# and the autocomplete of an IDE and you've never even done C++ then in UE4 when you get to the point that you have to use C++ to try and finish you work it will clobber your productivity.

Also, once you get past the shiny, realistic look of the environment that's a default in UE4 you'll see what's behind that you find interesting it is still what you bring to it. UE4 is not going to make trying to get rich off of making a video game interesting if you aren't truly interested in making video games. And for that you need interest in your video game's subject matter and that isn't zombies and wars, not really. Those are seen as 'what sells'. You still might not get rich making a video game you are interested in and not what is seen as popular but you will have an interest in what you are doing at least. Don't mistake wanting to be able to create 'oh wow graphics' with interest in the subject matter with those graphics.

I'm going to the Smokies to look for shiny gold later this summer, I consider my chances at a hit game considerably less than finding gold in the Smokies.

 

Agreed!

 

Because masterprompt was talking about the general consensus of people who work in the AAA studios and the number of major AAA titles made with Unreal still dwarfs the number of major AAA titles made with Unity. To my knowledge anyway. Therefore, more people in the AAA sector are generally more likely to be biased towards Unreal than Unity and my own experience has shown that to be the case. Not that this automatically invalidates what they have to say, but again it should be taken with a big grain of salt.

Similarly, I wouldn't be particularly surprised if someone who mostly uses a mac has negative things to say about windows (or vice versa). There may or may not be merit to what they have to say, but given their bias you shouldn't necessarily automatically take their word as gospel.

Also note that I didn't say that they never or don't use Unity at all. Obviously some do. But there's a difference between a AAA studio using Unity for the side project or smaller project or experimental project vs using it for the big budget AAA project. I don't see many of them making their next Halo or Assassin's Creed or Mass Effect or GTA in Unity when compared to Unreal, which are the kinds of games I assume we're talking about when talking about AAA projects.

 

Frankly, GTA4 and Halo4 (on last gen consoles) would be really difficult to do in Unreal Engine 3, and downright impossible to pull off in Unreal Engine 4, just so you know, reality check and all. UE3 and 4 are just too slow. Mass Effect was UE3 though, and that worked out OK but it generally favored closed environments.

If a lot of you do have big dreams, you'll have to come to terms with the fact there's no magic bullet, and speed is the most important part of making something look good. There's no point in using Brigade 3 for your next game if only 20% of your customers have a rig good enough for it.

If Unity ends up being the faster choice with visuals ballpark UE4, then it's a no brainer - to me it's worth whatever Unity charges for it.

 

It worries me that I keep hearing this. How much of a beast of a system you need to run things made with UE4 and stuff like that. Is it really the case, or is it that the tech demos are meant to show off hardware + software to the max and people using it don't know how to optimise it for stuff where speed actually matters yet?

I was initially writing off the "you need a beast of a rig" comments as amateurs being macho... but I'm also hearing it from people who aren't amateurs and/or don't have a history of being macho.

 

Well you ideally will have source for both UE3 and UE4. Assuming you have the source, you're going to have to invest time and energy and possibly manpower to get it how you want it. Being open source means UE4 might see some gains here, but that's trying to stuff a train engine into a mini, something will give, and this most likely will end up being quality as opposed to starting with a blank slate and putting effort into making it look better.

UE4 will always burn more resources - it's designed to. You'd need to cut out a heck of a lot for it not to, then you're practically down to Unity level, to build up and out from, making the entire endeavour pointless for a lot of games.

What Unity needs to focus on most of all is fixing up it's stability and keeping a real edge speed wise. Speed in development. Speed in execution.

Give people the potential to grow as much as they want, but don't grow a giant turd they can't fix.

Most of the people moaning are just moaning about the price, and I think that's been done to death over and over by this point (no disrespect to the OP ofc).

 

I guess my thing is that whether or not "it's designed to", if I did equivalent projects in both and the UE4 one ran slower I wouldn't care if it was by design or not. I understand that it can do cool stuff that other, less fancy engines can not. But if I'm not using them I don't want to pay a performance cost simply for having had the option.

It still boils down to "the right tool for the job", of course.

 

I don't believe there are any AAA games that are made with Unity. I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure it would have been fairly decent news.

I think it would be nearly impossible to find any general consensus on any topic amongst large/AAA studio devs. Basically because they are made of geeks/game developers. Sort of an intrinsic personality thing. Good programmers/developers are generally pretty arrogant. (I speak inclusively). Top tier developers usually have the credit/rep to reinforce their hubris/arrogance. I would agree that generally, that most would have a bais, but I don't think that really means anything. A AAA studio wouldn't really be in a position where they would actually be choosing between the two. Unity isn't really a AAA engine, and most are pretty entrenched in the whatever engine they are already using. Usually their own. The changes in UE don't really affect the AAA market.

We are a AAA studio, and we use our own engine(s) for the AAA titles. Though I am on the mobile side and we have, over the last year or so, switched almost exclusively to Unity for our mobile and other non-AAA projects. A few of us have been playing around with UE, but nothing much more than that. As it matures we will keep an eye on it, but for now its not really a viable option. I would say that generally most of our biases are very contextual, based on project and need. So while many of us may favor either UE or Unity (or more often other/own engines), it would almost no impact on what tool is ultimately chosen. Those choices are made on hard data/practical reasons. (for better or worse).

 

Always.
Sadly, though sometimes the best tool for the job come along when your project is 90% complete. Marvel Avengers Alliance was like that for us. We did a ton of R&D, I built prototypes in practically everything I could. Unity just wasn't up to the task when we started. We built it native. Of course by the time it was going live, Unity was up to it. AIR had also improved enough to be a viable choice. It sucked. By doing it native, every subsequent platform was port/rebuild. The game is exists on 5 platforms, and all of them were built on different platforms. Sigh. Sadly there just wasn't a better option at the time.

 

I have to disagree there. Availability is a pretty important criteria. If a tool isn't available when it's needed then it can't possibly be the best tool for the job, because it's not even a valid tool.

You got the job done using tools that were available at the time. Tools that exist now could have done it better/faster/cheaper, sure, but since you didn't have them then that's kind of a moot point. Otherwise nobody would ever do anything because something better is always coming.

(Well, I guess you could have a case where there are no valid tools yet...)

 

Well there are a few AAA studios who have made mobile games, but I've never seen an all out PC / Console AAA or even AA come out with Unity and it's really no surprise either. Unity just simply isn't buttered that way, not only will you reach it's limits fairly quickly you'll either place a heavy reliance on the asset store which isn't a good idea or you'll be spending a good portion of development time improving and adding. Even the little things like lack of color grading, seems trivial but it's all things you have to take account for.

You obviously can make Unity look good and perform well, implement your own Color Grading / DOF / AA / MB / Dirt Mask / Bloom / Volumetric Shadows / GI / Occlusion culling / Auto Async methods / replace all the shaders / terrain system / cinematics system / VFX / Extend the particle system. But at some point you have to figure out you're wasting more time on tech than actually making a game. As bigger budget games are on a time crunch, you'd be better off using something that works. Some people miss the fact that decent lighting systems etc. are deeply routed into the engine, you can't just try and hack around it and hope for the best. Lighting is probably one of the most important parts of making a game look good and it's not all down to shaders only.

Also most of the respected AAA dev's I knew aren't geeks at all, they are generally family guys with a development knack so to speak in the senior development arena.

 

Most AAA dev's like redoing their own:
Color Grading / DOF / AA / MB / Dirt Mask / Bloom / Volumetric Shadows / GI / Occlusion culling / Auto Async
Their ego make them think they can do better (which is true 1 out of 5 times..). you can't imagin the quantity of time lost in a AAA production.
Programmer always think that they can do better in less time (always!). And you rarely have a lead that are strong enough to stop them re-inventing the wheel...
Sometimes even the artist just don't like the tool and a prog spend 4 months to do the exact same thing just a little better, so the artist don't spend 3 hours doing a boring task. Yes 4 months spend for 3 hours gain... Of course lead should stop this, but that's not how it works in AAA
So they have time. They just don't spend it wisely most of the time.

AAA Prog also like an engine where they can show their skills, even if that's not necessary for the game. They like doing tech instead of a game because they are specialiste. The graphic prog don't care if the gameplay is bad and boring. His number one concern is that it looks good. That's the problem with big team made of specialist. So an engine with the source code is always more sexy, even if it's not necessary to make a good game. Specialists can express themself.

You can be sure that most AAA using UE replace at leat 30% of the entire code base to fit their game.

Buying a ready made shader from the asset store. How glorious is that ?
You are just saying that someone sell for 50$ what it will cost you 2 months of work...

UT market departement think that shiny FX and GI will makes AAA dev purchase Unity. Shiny tactic works on begginer. But for pro this is completly stupid, because they have graphic programmers...
No they want something that don't break when you work on a team bigger than 5, and the source code so they are less dependent on Unity bug fix speed. That's their number one concerned.

 

Certainly. I meant purely in the "that's annoying" sense. Shipping is always the most important feature. On rare occasions a tool or method will be discovered early in development that the switch cost is justified. But it is particularly annoying when something comes along just past that point or before the game is final. It's not so bad afterwards, but during sucks. But that is just part of game dev/tech. Still annoying though.

 

Indeed. Unity is "capable" of producing a AAA with some serious time investment, but reality is that it isn't "designed" to facilitate the needs of a huge pipeline and project. Even with the source code, it isn't really optimal for that. It is designed to support a certain methodology, and it works great for that.

One of the leads on my team, I kid you not, does all of coding in emacs. Its a trip.

 

I've worked for a couple of AAA's mate, that's not their mindset at all. They want everything doing NOW! It's not the dev's or artists that have a say in anything, you can spend tons of time implementing your own tech. The only reason we did tech demo's was to get public interest, it's all a marketing scheme. BUT if you are a true AAA, then you have the money not to use a pre-made engine you just chuck money at a wall and make your own. That's what they do, throw money at a wall until the problem goes away..

If it takes someone two months to make a shader, they would most likely be out the building. For the small team we are (15 Members) we can whip up near enough any shader in a matter of days, not months. (Post effects excluded).. I'm saying you can make Unity look good as ZG says with ALOT of time and investment.

It's tools that really drain our time and it makes you wonder why you should go to that effort, when the competition already has it in?

I agree, the fundamentals need sorting out and if you have read some of my previous posts that's what it's all about. I'm still wondering why a 64-bit editor is this late in?

 

Emacs is for pansies. Real men use vi.

I worked with a guy who didn't use a mouse in Windows. He knew every shortcut. He typed so fast it sounded like a machine gun. BrrrBrrrrrrBrrrrBrrr

 

Very OT, but: Real men use vi [if they have good memory and use it since ever].
Where I work I would say about 15-20% of devs use VI key bindings (but very few use pure VI, they use VI key bindings in other IDEs). Our desktops were Solaris once, now Linux, for some of these guys VI was the default IDE once.

 

This made my day, thank you and congratulation. Do vi users ever step up from 10 lines of code?

 

This is the first time I've seen a zing with a blast radius. Hat's off to you, sir

 

Um, I purposely avoid using numbers to repeat vi commands because of typos messing up code and repeating the mistake so it was and sometimes is hjkl and ctl-b / ctrl-f / ctl-I for me. And much, much faster to go though and read oodles of more code than any GUI IDE. LOL, you can't use a GUI generator to create 50 pages of code in vi and pretend coding just wears you out.

 

I don't know you, but as this thread has progressed I must sadly admit I've lost any/all respect for you... I honestly wish you wouldn't speak of things you know nothing about as the newbs will (because your fancy "super moderator" title) take your word as gospel.

Anyone making GTA or Halo would need a HUGE budget and would need much more than any indie-level tool could provide PERIOD. You sit here and say that "unreal can't do this, unreal can't do that" but you fail to say that Unity falls short in the SAME PLACES! I enjoy Unity a lot however at least I can give credit to UE where credit is objectively due.

UE is not "too slow", it's more beefy out of the box. You don't want real time cubic environment, turn it off. Don't want volumetric fog, turn it off. They turn all that stuff on by default in the template projects to make it look good out of the box. The concept is very simple: If you want to use a template project, you opt-out of the features they felt should be on in the template. If you start a project from scratch, you opt-in to everything... Their tappy bird example is a great example of how their engine can be used on a stupidly basic rig.

Your a Unity fanboy, I get it. This is a Unity forum, I get that too. But stop inserting your foot into your mouth every time you feel the world is ready for your golden advice... We all want what's best for us individually and we all enjoy Unity (otherwise we wouldnt be here asking for wiggle room on their pricing) so there is no need to mud sling the other, perfectly viable solutions, just to tell us how "lucky" we are to be allowed in this forum...

You don't need a "beast of a rig" anymore than you would need a "beast of a rig" to pull of the same (albeit sub standard) look in Unity. It's all up to how many neat effects you want to show...

OMG I am done reading your insane level of ignorance! You have any figures on this? Any references sir? Because I'll gladly go through how much resources Unity has burned through with our team... Having to work around little "gotchas" that require hours of research and trial and error (Draw calls, transform/garbage collection, GUI GUI GUI GUI, Editor bugs, Prefab ambiguities, script serialization, etc, etc, etc).

And, if you think that getting a bare-bones framework of a game up and running (speed in development) is quicker in Unity than UE, then add hypocrite to the growing list of faults as you said it yourself, there is no magic bullet (although you are right about the magic bullet)... You can design a framework 100 different ways and each one will require it's own amount of commitment in time. Unity needs to maintain it's stability, yes, but it needs to also stay competitive otherwise they'll have to charge the 10 last customers they have 100k each just to cover their overhead...

As for growing a giant turd... Lets talk about Unity GUI or Asset server (a turd we paid for) shall we?

 

I don't think that UE4 is slow. It is written in C++ and thus nearer to machine code than using C# as a cover on C/C++ like in Unity. Look at the Uncharted series, those guys optimized even on assembler level to show what can be done with a given hardware. And when I have to consider what UE4 offers out of the box it is resonable that it needs more hardware power.

 

I also think this is an over-generalization. With any such game you do a ton of custom code and optimizations like custom culling and LOD and more. Independently of engine, your own, UE4 or any other.

Maybe UE4 can be slow for certain things per default, but that would be no problem for such studios. Question is with what engine they have to do the fewest complex changes to get it done like they want, UE4 or own engine or whatever. Since next gen rendering quality is required for AAA, UE4 is a valid candidate.

There is no make-GTA4-button yet in UE4. But I still hope we get such a thing in the asset store. I have multiple game ideas that depend on it ;-)

 

My turn to jump in this huge thread

I don't really understand all the people comparing Unity and UE4 in terms of AAA graphics/performance, considering that the most part of Unity users is composed of small, often one-man-only, indie studios, that will never be able to create an AAA game (not because of a lack of expertise, but because of a lack of manpower).
Unity was always very indie-friendly, and I actually don't like seeing it expanding in an AAA direction that A) doesn't attract me, B) is already well filled by other engines like UE4. I would prefer that they concentrated on what entices small studios most, like bug fixing and make all the current features work correctly (and with decent API) with as much performance as possible, while keeping prices indie-friendly. Just saying

 

I think you're pretty obnoxious about this so I'm not going to dignify your self-important tirade with a reply. I will say you've managed to offend me in multiple ways and you've also taken it personal, which I have no interest in. You also take me out of context and misquote my intentions at every turn.

Thankfully you've had the sense to edit some of the more rude comments you made.

I'm coming from a point of view of consoles, and here, you need a lot of speed. Unity's engine is by default stripped down enough for us to build up and out from, while in our testing with UE4 (which we had a year before you did) we had to strip it down. That's all I'll say. I've not said UE4 is bad, but you seem to read only what you want.

I'm done with this thread and it's frankly obnoxious and offensive OP.

 

Now that, I can get behind

 

This isn't the type of profession where making more loud noises gets you respect, or signifies to other people that your correct. Have you considered football?

 

That's originally what it was about; competitive pricing for the indie market. The whole comparison to AAA studios came when people tried to write off UE's entry into the indie market as being AAA studio only and not valid as competition, or in direct comparison. But the whole "vote with your wallets" should (per hippocoder's official recommendation) be taken to heart as it speaks loads about the state of the indie community. Gone are the days where a tightly knitted community could go in a direction as a whole with clear roadmap and here are the days where a company moves away from the culture/vision which made them who they are today.

What rude comments did I edit?

 

Any developer would be foolish to follow what other people perceive as being the best, since no one has the same needs in terms of development.

Personally i will be moving my current project away from Unity and over to Unreal Engine 4 for multiple reasons, but what i do is not what everyone should do. Unity offers a great selection of tools that will help a lot of developers spend more time realizing their product rather than figuring out how to. The same can be said for anyone using Gamemaker or Unreal Engine, it comes down to what helps them realize their product the best.

Can Unity be used to make a GTA sized game? Of course, but the engine would not perform well as is and neither would Unreal Engine unless you made some extensions to how the massive influx of data is handled. I personally love a lot of things that Unity does right, but they are still lacking in so many areas that repeatedly have caused me headaches and seem hellbent on being available on every platform despite breaking core functionality along the way. A lot of the assets i have bought on the assets store will not scale properly to other platforms and overall is just a mess in terms of multi platform scalability.

Not to talk about the fact that Unity actively seem to prohibit startup developers from succeeding, the initial commitment price for a Unity Pro development seat is very steep be it subscription or a one time pay as any developer cannot properly determine just how good an investment Pro would be for a given project as they cannot test it. Epic of all companies seem a lot more reasonable in their new beliefs with them only succeeding if their customers succeed, the exact opposite of how Unity currently operate. Unity also seems to be extremely bad at adding better core functionality to the engine as they are withholding larger components for paid upgrades and seem to take a very long time to integrate new components to the product that their customers have already paid for.

In general i believe that Unity should keep the current pricing system intact, but make the Unity Pro trial unlimited for developers to use.

 

@Masterprompt: You quoted short little out-of-context bites. Here is what you quoted from me (carefully snipped out by you):

Originally Posted by hippocoder
...UE3 and 4 are just too slow....

Out of context, mangled from:

- the context of why AAA chose to go inhouse as opposed to using Unreal Engine. ie Rockstar's Rage engine. The conversation up to this point was about AAA, nothing to do with Unity. But you knew that and twisted it anyway.

Originally Posted by hippocoder
UE4 will always burn more resources - it's designed to. You'd need to cut out a heck of a lot for it not to....making the entire endeavour pointless for a lot of games... ...Give people the potential to grow as much as they want, but don't grow a giant turd they can't fix....

This one is an unbelievable mangling of my words. Here is the original in context:

- you managed to make that look biased when it was unbiased and even critical of Unity. Yes I was being critical of Unity but you made it out that I was critical of UE4. Wow.

Here is your OP in case you go and edit stuff: http://i.imgur.com/RDrw9On.png

I think there's enough evidence here now for people to draw their own conclusions about your character assassination of me, so I'll have to ask you to take your grievances to PM rather than continue to act in this manner on a public forum.

 

Like I said this guys whole aim is not that of reasoned debate it's basic Agent Provocateur stuff lauding UE4 and attacking Unity. Dump the thread now his intentions are clear. No doubt there will be more of these threads to keep UE4 on everyone's mind.

 

Well.. I am starting to get worried for Unity - Now that they (Epic Games) have released their roadmap which includes low end mobile Optimizations (How Low end is TBD) and allot of other features that unity currently does not have.

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/sharing-the-unreal-engine-4-roadmap

 

In my opinion, masterprompt, you're quite obviously biased against Unity, so just get UE4. There's no point leading a 10 pages long forum thread about your rants on how horrible Unity is. For me, I personally am sticking to Unity for the foreseeable future, because I focus on prototyping and up-to-medium sized games, hence don't need the overhead of all the Unreal tools as hippo has correctly described.

 

Ok, new GUI is almost there, but we are near the end of 4.x cycle. This is not cool.

On the other hand, people do have choice. They do choose to preorder. There are risks when preordering a product and by doing so, you accept those risks. When you choose to buy 4.0 after it got released without a GUI you know you are taking a risk. I am not saying it is ok that GUI got delayed, I say it was a known possibility at the moment of the purchase. Same thing applies for the other things masterprompt spotted at his first post.

Should this define one's future purchases ? Sure.
Should one be aware and try the alternatives ? Absolutely.
Should one ask for more and / or go to a competitor that sees as more fit for his projects ? Of course.

What I write below is not directed to masterprompt, or other forum members who choose to be vocal about Unreal and Unity's price policy. l I believe it is relevant to this thread's general tone, as well to other threads that pop up lately.

I do not mind seeing people who know little about Unity and Unreal, with a ridiculous budget talking about AAA features comparison of those engines. It is actually quite funny.

What I dislike is the presence of Unreal evangelists in the Unity forum. I am not talking about the people who share their concerns, their experiences, their thoughts. I talk about those who are paid - favored in many ways to promote Unreal here. It is not cool.

Voting with your wallet is a good thing. Voting for your wallet isn't.

 

Actually, just the opposite. I seriously need the price to come down otherwise I'll be cornered into switching a whole team (albeit small team) to a competing product. I have a few personal (side) projects that I built using Unity (over the last 2 years) that I need to support long term which, if I have to buy Unity personally, may pose a big problem. I know the plugins I'm using won't be support very long after U5 is released. Worth noting the boss saw this thread the other day and hasn't been too happy with things I've said. I've got 2 more days until the meeting to bide my time; I fear the decision has already been made based on the general attitude I've seen.

This thread has run its course in my honest opinion as the official responses weren't helpful even though they were consistent. I've reached out to Unity outside the forum a few times now and I can sadly say that this forum post had more official response than the other attempted avenues. It would seem, from a customer facing perspective, that Unity will stay true to whatever their roadmap may be. So far it just looks like Unity 5 hype and shaking dollars from pockets.

As for 10 pages long rant... Not sure why David chimed in; the thread wasn't a roll call of users staying and users leaving nor was it an open invite to find out what anyone else was using/doing. I honestly don't care what engine your using, what size games you make, or why you still prefer an old flip phone to a smartphone. I am concerned with my budget and keeping my guys working and moving forward to meet our deadlines.

 

Anyone saying that Unity is better than UE4 or UE4 is better than Unity is just a stupid blinded ignorant (sorry but that's the right therm yes).
Take for instance this plain simple analogy: How can you compare an orange vs an apple? There's no way to compare them because they are quite different (but hey, they both are fruits)! Same idea applies to UE4 vs Unity. Those tools are game engines that have very different workflows (with the minor exception of coding). The time you spend creating games with both of those tools will depends upon two big factors, how experienced you are using those tools, out of the box engine features and engine stability (working around limitations and bugs is a huge factor btw). The rest, will be defined by your own pipeline, internal workflow and manpower/budget.
It's true that each one of those engines are better than the other with specific game types. For instance multiplayer gaming is natively supported by UE4 and can easily be done (or even add support for it furthermore in development) with little to almost tweaks. Last week I've made a small online football demo with UE4, it took me less than 4 hours.
But still, competitive aggressive prices will be a factor for a lot of indies/small developers.

 

I'll go OT, but since Ippokratis mentioned the UE4 roadmap... I have to say I felt very sad in seeing another engine do something that we Unity users ask since a long time. I'm not talking about any particular feature: I'm talking about the friggin' roadmap (which is so friggin'* that I'm putting it in bold). If anything, Unity should reeeeally learn to be a little more communicative with its userbase :|

* I'm not English, and I hope "friggin'" sounds as ridiculous as it does to me. No offense intended

 

I'm not sure why people are going on here about how 'slow' UE4 is. You can reduce the quality of the editor when you're developing for better performance.

And running a game in UE4 when built and optimised will work on most hardware, and run better than it did in the editor, and of course being such a powerful engine graphically, if you don't have a top rig you'll need to turn some features off.

 

So this is just a request for Unity to lower their price? Everything else are just justifications? Ok.

I think you definitely need to convince Unity they're worse here. How much will you really save with EU4's $19/mo?

Correct me if wrong here, or if I'm missing something...

Epic gets a 5% fee. That seems nothing, but in the long run, say an employee costs $3k a month after taxes, 36k per employee yearly. Say you're indeed making that profit per employee... Then Epic's fee is costing you $1800 per employee, per year. 2 grand if we include subscription cost, and this is a cost per year.

If/when you get a bigger profit than normal, that 5% fee might cost you even more, which translates to a bigger chunk out of your savings for the cold winter.

You could say Unity license is expensive as well! But cost (all mobile licenses included) is $4500 only the first time per user, per version (less than yearly) but then it's $1800 to upgrade...(even less than UE4 $2k yearly estimate) if unity upgrades version every two years, you're spending $900 per user, less than half than you might be paying for UE4 fees. And this is not even using the team licenses, or buying PC license only, or not really upgrading version at all (in the wild case you don't need to upgrade).

Here's a graph with my estimates:


You should also add the cost of your team enduring UE4 learning curve.

I don't know what your estimates are, but how much you expect to save per year with UE4? is it really that much? And once you're past the learning curve, how long you expect until you get your money back?

 

^ This.

Going full-monty on Hippo was completely unprofessional, and yet, I appreciate that this thread continues to raise these serious concerns. As a pro user who's passed the $10k mark, I feel snubbed.

Note - Four years ago, I chose to make a massive change in technology. If I were making that decision today, as I expect thousands of developer's are doing right now, I'd be posting in a different forum.

Gigi.

 

They've said they can't comment right now. We have no idea what business deals they are making behind the scenes that require discretion. Unity has worked some fantastic deals with other companies like the Nintendo deal. The best thing we can do is work on our art or code.

 

All this seems to be is you can't afford Unity Pro and you're whining so they'll lower the price. Quit your burger flipping, minimum wage job and save your money so you can get Pro. You also seem to say F*** off to anyone who has an opinion. David gave you his opinion, and it was a totally fine one, you clearly have something against Unity. If you think Unity is going to lower the price of Pro because you can't afford it. See link below. I'm tired of this thread, it's pointless.

http://www.unrealengine.com/

 

@ Masterprompt, hang on a minute. You should care about other developers situations, there is strength in numbers and good contacts to be had. There are a couple of AAA's here or big MMO / RPG makers I have been fortunate enough to learn a lot from..

@ Tato, no it's not stupid to compare apples or oranges.. Engine vs. engine, a tool should rarely be the limiting factor in game creation. A lot of the issues discussed are not Unity specific, if you had bugs in Modo you have a right to complain. If it lacks some features, you have a right to complain Unity and Unreal are no different to any other tool on the market. A lot of people have reached out with their thoughts, it's up to Unity to listen and acknowledge and release Unity 5 in a competitive state. Whatever that may entail!

@ GMM of course, then again as a developer you should be smart enough to find out what works for you. Let's not be crazy, Unity would of fallen over way before you got 10% into a game like GTA5.. Maybe Unity 5 will rectify this?

Graphics are the least of my worries with Unity, stable core functionality and necessary tools. Doesn't really need much more than that, I'm sure I can google source for various post and plug it or buy some if so needed. But it's not the job of the asset store to fill necessary gaps, UE4 has the right tool sets in it to get the job done.

Finally:

I like Unity a lot, I much prefer working in it and I'm used to it.. But it's ONLY a tool. Fact of the matter is, UE4 has nearly everything covered Unity has and also brings more to the table for less initial outlay. Do I expect Unity to be of the same caliber? No I don't, I expect it to work right and give us the tools UE4 has as a base product. Not an asset store shop stop..

Let's move the engine aside for now, Epic are far more open to criticism and their support is swift. They generally are much more open in general and are making very swift progress. They give us examples of how things should be done, they all in all are doing a good job.. For this level of support and swift helpful persona I'd pay much more than they are asking for, I'd dig deep..

Do I expect Unity to do the same? No, but I do want them to be a little more open and start pushing the boundaries again. Whatever you think of the two products you can't deny things would be better with a more Epic approach?

 

No it is not pointless.

Unity is no longer competitive in terms of price. Unity used to be top dog in its market now with Unreal Engine coming around and offering better service and Support they will be getting more customers.

Personally I do not think we will get a price drop. Which will hurt Unity IMO. People will go with unreal engine and To be fair I do not blame them.
I look at it like this -

If people are no longer using unity then people will no longer be using be buying from the asset store.

To top things off -

[*] Unity is not being as open as they should be when they claim that they want to democratize game development.
[*] Uninformed changes to the Unity EULA / Asset Store EULA (Examples being Gambling and The more recent Refund issue. )
[*] Known Issues that are not fixed since version 1.x or 2.x.
[*] etc. etc. etc.