UE4 3k price drop and democratization

There is another thing that we might not be aware is that they integrade partenr tech.
If they pay them royalties, they need to negociate with them a change in the business model. And it may take some times.

 

Depends on:

a) if many people start trolling
b) if it hasn't been discussed elsewhere

It IS veering a tad off topic, which makes my toes itch but I'm sure people can steer themselves back on track (price/royalties rather than mindlessly flinging mud)

 

Heh.. well first off, your Bieber example was poorly chosen. He wasn’t the product of 'corporations' at first. The democratization of media and particularly social media is where he got his start. And music isn't a really a decent comparison to games, movies would be more appropriate. As far as cookie cutter designs…. it wasn’t exactly EA filling up the app store with crappy bird clones.

But no, my response had nothing to do with creativity or it sources or expression, in fact quite the opposite. Your comment...

..Is somewhat contradictory to that idea. That is why I thought you were being sarcastic. You are essentially saying that creativity is currently limited because someone else hasn't done ground work. Those who are creative and doing original things are doing it right now. And only in part does the engine have an impact on that. The creative engineering and application of it done by the studios like Epic, Cry, Dice, etc is what drives their games. Waiting/expecting them to provide it to everyone else isn't really definition of creativity. There are incredibly artistic games being released all the time by truly creative folks who aren’t waiting for others to provide the tools.

And there is a ton of opportunity for creative development. But there are no magic tools that will allow for individuals or small teams to compete or achieve the sales/scale of the big production games. It has nothing to do with creativity or originality or anything like that, they are just vastly different products. Imagine all things being equal, (idea, concept, vision, etc.) 2 people could build a bigger and better game than 1. 10 can do better than 2, 100 better than 10 and so on. Games are huge endeavors with and only getting bigger. One person with the best digital camera available still won't be able to create or compete with The Avengers. Though he still could get massive critical acclaim and make an award winning indy film. Tools aren't going create a convergence where suddenly a kid in his room can compete with top end AAA titles. For one he will always lack the resources, and two, tech doesn't sit still. The drivers in the industry keep moving forward. By the time tools are released for mass consumption, the big boys have or are building the next evolution of it.

Besides, if there were a magic tool that allowed small teams to create games on scale of GTAV, then there would just be several thousand similar games and no one would make any money. Democratization happens all time, especially in the tech sector. But result isn't that now everyone can suddenly compete with the top end. What happens is the top end becomes a bit smaller, the middle are fades away, and the low end becomes massive racing to the be the cheapest. It is/has happened in games, design, printing, certain types of art, music and photography and many others. Cheap, powerful cameras didn't create a ton of high end photographers, it made everyone a photographer, and in general rates are fraction of what the once were. But the top teir still exists.

Creative and original indies have always been around. They push and evolve the industry at every turn. They aren't limited by or wait for others to provide them tool, they just build them. And like almost every other industry/discipline that grows and becomes popular, the inspired and driven ones have already gotten on board. The late adopters aren't were much interesting or inspired work comes from. They are the "me too!"s and the ones in it for a quick buck. The crappy bird/slender/pokemon/etc crowd. And while, no doubt there still some new people coming to gaming that are creative, they have a tougher and tougher time of because of the flip side of democratization.

The greatest thing about the industry right now is that anyone can make a game. They worst thing about things now is that anyone can make a game. Still, it is an overall a win, at least for players.

 

Struggling may be a little strong, but the trending down. More engines, and changes in the industry. Sweeny had basically said something along the lines of if the didn't change their future was questionable. Indeed the business model is sound, and really products as services is where a lot of things are headed. (it is really Freemium/IAP applied to the world outside of games.) UT is sort of testing the water just a bit with their subs. Epic, said F*** it and did a cannonball right in. Honestly, very few companies (in any industry) have the ability even try what Epic did. It just doesn't ever happen like that. Super cool see it unfold. And kind of fitting that a huge play like this comes from a game company. The term "game changer" is thrown around way too often. But in the case of Epic, it could't more accurate.

Indeed the potential is there. And even with some additional overhead, revenue they make off subs is pretty much free money. (not exactly, but close enough). It isn't a new product, it is an existing product, the development costs were already paid through their normal channels, they just found a new way to make money off of it. It would take a concerted effort to screw that up.

But I would say that a million subs is overly optimistic at best (at least for a while). Unity has been the most popular engine now for a while, and certainly have the biggest chunk of the market (even bigger on mobile). And they can only boast about 600k monthly users, with a huge chunk of those being free. (also, being marketing numbers they are probably 'rounded up'). With the ability to stop subscribing and the fact that larger studios, or studios who have already invested in Unity or in the middle of projects probably aren't going be switching in the near future. To hit a million a month they will have to way beyond convincing people switch, they would have bring in hundreds of thousands of new developers. Though, at that price point they will also pick up people like me who don't have any plans to actively develop in it, but want to play with it. But still, even if they only get a fraction of that at this point that still is millions they weren't getting before. It is really hard for them to not make a chunk of change off of it.

As a side note, for a studio like ours, it really has no draw at this point. We are now virtually all Unity on the mobile side, and our AAA stuff is either in house engines or ones like Frostbite. I am on the mobile/mid-core side of things, and we have several hundreds of Unity licenses and even the Unity source license from time to time. UE just isn't up our needs for mobile now, and even if it was, it doesn't offer an advantage over Unity right now. And especially nothing that would offset our current investment and pipeline. And this is true for many of the other top studios around here. Unity still is the weapon of choice for pro/top studios for the foreseeable future. But that is a specific market.

 

Not only does it still exist, it'll get higher and further out of reach to the majority of people even if the tools to reach the base level become more accessible.

Pre-"democratisation" to be among the best you need to be a) lucky enough to get into an industry and then b) talented/smart/disciplined/skilled/driven enough to fight your way to the top. The constraint imposed by part a meant that part b was a little easier, insofar as there were fewer people to compete against to be a forerunner. (I'm not saying it was easy. Being an industry pioneer absolutely has its challenges.)

As things get democratised and barriers to entry get lower the pool of people competing gets bigger, which if you're competitive makes it more challenging across the board.

In any case, though, the forerunners of a particular industry aren't usually the ones with great ideas. They're the ones talented/smart/disciplined/skilled/driven enough to solve the problems that stopped other people from achieving similar ideas before them. And those solutions are built on top of the many solutions provided by prior forerunners.

We each only have so much time to consume stuff, and thanks to how the human brain sees all things relatively it doesn't really matter what range of quality is put in front of us, we'll always perceive the best as being great and the worst as being crap* and devote our time to the former over the latter even if the difference isn't that significant. There'll always be competition to be the one making the thing everyone think's is great.

Back to the point, though. Making innovative stuff isn't about having an innovative idea. It's about coming up with the solutions required to realise that innovative idea. And, as zombie says, you don't become that person by waiting for other people to give you the solutions. If those solutions existed then your idea wouldn't be innovative.

The innovation is in the solution, not the idea.

* Remember in the 1990s when you saw a game and thought it looked great? I bet you've seen better looking games since and thought they looked bad. This is especially noticeable in the field of graphics, but applies anywhere with noticeable progression.

 

Fine for me is a fluid gameplay. I don't see any slideshow here.

 

Why are you guys profiling those high end demos? Wouldn't it be more productive to make a sample scene for your games and profile those? That is how game studios determine their budgets for graphics memory. It shouldn't take too much time to set up a sample scene by importing FBX files from your Unity projects, rig up some materials/shaders, and look at the FPS counter.

Even if their demos sailed smoothly at 60 fps I would still be highly skeptical because they have no gameplay. So they are quite useless for benchmark testing for any video game

Approach this in a smart way. You profile an actual game that is hitting all those cores (physics, game thread, render thread, animation thread, etc). Determine if it is GPU or CPU bound. If it is GPU bound then their Artists simply tossed too much pixels at the screen which is soo easy to do in Unreal.

But really, don't profile those demos. It is a waste of time. Time would be better spent profiling ShooterGame

 

I don't think UT will announce anything regarding a new price model, since they are currently additionally gathering money from the pre-orders. Wouldn't many pre-order customer demanding thier money back when UT presents a low-price subscription model?

1500$ is a high amount of money for many people, especially hobbists. It would be cool to buy some pro features seperatly, for example the profiler. Many could profit from optimizing their games and the brand Unity would also profit from better games.

 

I thought this post had some very good points btw. Unity has a firm foothold into studios for this sort of work and I don't think it will get ousted anytime soon from that area

 

i Dont quite understand exactly the point (my English is not very good, im sorry)

On the one hand, does this mean that Unity would want to move from a tool of choice for hobbiest and small indies and is becoming the tool for medium and large companies?

on the other hand, is the investment made in Unity the main reason why another graphics engine are not convenient then?
What happens when UE leaves the BETA State and become solid with movile support? because I think that is the direction where UE is going right?

 

My best guess would be that Unity has a firm grip in mobile space. If you are asking why I feel that way it is because tons of studios are already using it. I mean quite a LOT. And Unity 5 looks like it will be even better.

Now for AAA or hobby I think UE4 is a bigger threat.

My best guess- looking at Unreal codebase, is that it would be seriously tough to get executable sizes down (for mobile). Unity on the other hand I am guessing is quite lean due to not having many out-of-the-box toys. Everyone grabs assets from the store to suit their own purposes

This is all extreme guess work on my part. I don't dev mobile games nor do I currently have access to Unity source. Pure 100% theorycraft

 

Do you think we are stupid? We already have a portion of our own game built in Unreal 4, the performance on the whole is pretty poor unless you have a very beefy machine (That being said it looks a 1000X better as well), but we can't just publicly display everything were working on . We optimized ours more than the effects cave and I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty in the source code although if I'm paying for anything I don't see why I should!.. More time wasted.

Fact of the matter is even in two years at point of release, it's going to be a limiting factor to who we can release it to.

Unity 5 will look just as good and will pound UE4 in terms of performance due to Enlighten (If they do something about all the fancy particles in UE4). Why do you think I still hang around the Unity forums? If UE4 is the golden key I'd be off without a second thought.

UE4 does have a hell of a lot more going for it than Unity at the moment, but only time will tell what's going to be the right financial decision.

 

Yeah I'm quite skeptical without seeing profiles. I don't ever assume anyone is stupid but I don't ever put blind faith into posts either.

I would like to see vertex/fragment/cpu profiles

(You could send them to me in a private msg of course!)

 

I'll PM you a link, it's kind that you'll help out SBG but I'm not sure what you can tell me that my team of 15 some with 20+ years experience can't.

 

I still don't have any profiles in my inbox from you and I might have to leave in a bit. Try making a thread on ue4 forums with your issue and post actual profiles. I see your other thread you made complaining about your Elemental demo FPS and it was debunked it seems.

(I won't reply to this particular issue in this thread anymore because I don't want to derail it)

 

There is something terribly wrong with your machine then. I've run it on i7's with GTX 260 and it runs perfectly fine and no issues or drops like you've had

Easy. Computers are dirt cheap in North America. For the price of Unity you'd get as close to a top of the line machine as possible, so good mid-range machines cost around $500 - $700. The kicker is a person with not much money will spend that much on a computer because they know it will be used for a wide variety of things (everything from work to entertainment) and be good for several years without needing to upgrade.

Unity on the other hand, will need upgrading. You'll eventually run into a bug that needs fixing, and sometimes those bug fixes dont come until the next big release, which means you will have to pay again. So a person with not much money will not be as willing to spend money on a high-turn-around item like that.


Now to your exact question of how can a person who has the equipment to run it, wont be able to afford to pay $10 for subscription fees.

A: Most adults who have a computer are using one they purchased years ago (when their financial situation was better at that one point in time). Most people have only a small window every few years or so where they have extra money "to play with". Certain things in life eat up money, and a lot of the time they are unexpected, and your monthly income dwindles down to where people do not feel comfortable letting that $10 leave their pocket each month. Not because they cant technically afford it, but they see it as another burden that is making them lose money they dont need to lose .... even if it benefits them in some way. Its especially true when they compare it to something else they already pay for. So for example, I'll absolutely never ever pay $70+ per month for Unity or any piece of software. Why? Because I pay less for heating/gas or electricity per month, and thats a necessity for life. So to me, that is completely unjustifiable.

 

I took the liberty of renaming the thread a little. It's such an interesting discussion that concerns unity and it's competition that it's turned into.

$70 is way too high in my view. Yes I adore working in Unity, but I wouldn't dream of subscribing to it. Seems geared to pushing users toward just paying for it up front in my view, which isn't a good way to do business (having an option you don't want people to pick).

 

Then you must have a really low threshold for what you consider as "fluid". Usually 30fps is the bare minimum, to get gameplay without any noticeable lag.
Below 15 fps and it gets really choppy. And that's what I and other people with a similar card get at best, if running the effects cave, or shooter demo. And your 460M has a similar performance to a 650M.

 

To be fair a lot of the low framerate is disguised really well with the blur/aa they do.

 

Lol no way you could run it smoothly on a 260, plus it's been tested on about 17 machines now so err something is not right there ..

A 260 wouldn't even run the witcher 2 on decent settings, neither would it run any decent graphically challenging game. Crysis, Metro etc. would bomb it out. I can take something like a 660 running it fine, but a 260 just isn't believable.

 

Indeed, the post FX's have a great impact on performance. As well as the GPU particles. If I run a simple scene in UE4 I get around 30 fps. But that's without any gameplay, physics GUI etc.

Yes that is definitely bollocks. That isn't even a dx11 card. You can have as many i7's as you want. If you have a S***ty GPU, UE4 won't run well, because that is what UE4 heavenly relies on. Especially in projects like the effects cave with millions of GPU particles.

That said, I don't believe that would run better in Unity, if you would recreate something similar.

 

Well, guys.. I've been using Unity from a long time...

I am the one of the peoples who payed for Unity Basic license, when Unity was not free. And after a few months, super surprise "Unity Basic is free". I mean.. I don't know how many of you remember.. was lots of pages on this forum and others about the move, and etc etc and etc etc. I mean, was a big move. I've payed for Android version, and after a while gone free also. And again, lots of pages about that move again.

What I want to say is, that Unity have ALWAYS come with a big surprise. And I am sure they are not sleeping and watching whats happen around them also. In my opinion is just a matter of time now, until they will come with a big announce.

 

I have a high/mid range card and every demo on UE4 runs super quick at high res. I don't think you should dismiss ppl offhand cause each card has its quirks that can cause performance problems.

 

True.

I have no doubts that they evaluate different options to make Unity more competitive. The question is, when and how?

 

I also think that, well I think iI should not take a long time. I mean, who would invest in unity now, knowing that possibly unity could soon announce a new proposal. And again, if anything is not going to change, (considering they only know the numbers and probably are making a much more detailed and precise analysis than any of us can do in a post ), then many will choose options more convenient and will continue to not investing in unity.

For this is that I'm surprised for the total silence, as if we knew something to make a more clear choice, and perhaps speaking just for me, I'd be more willing to invest in unity and / or assets from the asset store.

but in the current situation, all is uncertainty, and much money involved, speaking as a hobbist with dreams of getting something good

Sorry for my English

 

They really should increase the exemption then to $40K but you're right $20 a month is $20 but they said you can stop subscription and still use UE4. So basically the $20 is to get you to register with them, develop to your heart's content without paying the $20 a month, and publish. If you get rich well they have a nice 5% now don't they? Question is do you need to renew the subscription for the month that you publish? Once published do you need to 'keep the subscription current' for some reason? Games must have some sort of 'ping' or they actually going to search for top sellers in the app stores? Would they recognize Top Sellers as being made by UE4?

Many potential headaches with this approach. Maybe something in the EULA requires the various App Stores to report apps and income using the UE4 engine to UE4. That's the most sensible and direct way, after all the engine is theirs and the 5% is theirs.

 

I don't think you understood me I meant that the post FX actually makes it look *smoother* by erasing much of the choppiness between frames due to motion blur. Motion blur itself isn't that much of a huge frame hit when we're at these detail levels. I doubt it takes more than 1-2ms frame, as it's deferred and the depth buffer would be available (among others).

 

Oh yes I misread that.

Personally, I don't see much of a difference with, or without motionblur.
But I can say that with all image effects disabled, I get a slightly better performance.
However, the awesome post FX is one of the things that let UE4 look that awesome. Especially their hdr bloom and the antialiasing.

 

Yeah I think for unity to compete they need a robust way of merging post fx. A supershader if you will, with a fast and slow variant. Currently, so much time is wasted if you try and stack effects at the moment, and they're just a js mess. I'd like them all in c# too.

 

I'd say one of the biggest problems post is the Anti-Aliasing, whether it's Forward rendering with MSAA or DR with FXAA / DLAA etc. it just disturbs a scene.. Don't get me wrong UE4 is not free from it, CryEngine is for whatever reason but they are wizards UE4 looks fantastic because of their implementation of TXAA..

I suppose I could make one myself, if I had the time.

 

Well... You can rest assure a lot of your current AAA titles may continue developing with UE3 and simply port it to next gen consoles (like Injustice PS4). UE4 may not reach critical mass until Epic Games ships on it. That is how it has worked traditionally. I've never seen a AAA title ship before Epic shipped with every engine iteration.

With Unity, you already have a fully mature asset store. Sure, you'll see lots of complaints here in the gossip section that will make you think maybe Unity is in danger. But instead, I'd challenge you to hit the Asset store / Work in Progress / Showcase sections. Much more excitement there. You'll quickly realize Unity isn't going anywhere.

There is a place for both game engines. You just need to find a good fit for your project. And if you hit a snag, trim and trim features until it fits nicely into the engine you choose

 

Pretty much what sandboxgod said.

 

Having access to the depth buffer doesn't make it any cheaper, you still have to compute the effect itself. And that's the depth based one, the image based one doesn't need any depth buffer at all.

 

I meant: as it's fully deferred, there's already normals rendered out among other things, which the post pipeline makes good use of. AFAIK unity's post effects do reuse this information but not well enough it seems at present. I know Robert has his eye on this though going forward.

 

All I can say is that there is lot of wana be developers complaining about either engines (Unity or UE4) without any actual knowledge of either engines or game development at all nor any accomplishment to backup their claims. In other words = pure fanboysm which confuses others peoples and contributes to the biased side of things.

 

I dont care what you believe or not, its what I experience, and I'm not the only one.

So you might want to open your eyes a little more before you spout the words "isn't believable".


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW2I6AnBMqQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHZxoyTLe1s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oCFy9fS-xM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiDKegmyLbQ


Hardware that is matched perfectly and without any bottlenecking and conflicts will work perfectly. The problem is most systems are not matched perfectly with hardware and minor conflicting and bottlenecking will occur, so while someone may have a newer card or gear, it may run far worse.

 

Hows about no and you're talking out your backside, I've got a 260 from a family member hanging around and tried it.. The thing is a piece of rubbish.

The reason why UE4 was running slow was because of Slate and an renderer bug, I've sorted it out.

 

No, I actually am not.

Just because you experienced something one way doesnt mean absolutely everyone else will experience it the exact same way also.

You are suffering from the typical "well, I think I'm an expert so I'm always right no matter what others say or do". But you might want to get off that high horse of yours.

 

Yes! I'm already testing out something new pretty awesome. Too bad I can't share any info on it.

 

I listen to people who know what they're talking about and cold hard talent , if 14 years of coding and games doesn't put you on at least a mediocre level of understanding it would be time to find a new career.

Feel free to shut me up by flaunting your talent with your amazing game you made. Tato and Hippo know their stuff, If they suggest something I'm all ears baby!.. OK enough, back on with the thread!.

 

I don't think Unity is actually trying to make differentiation. They built their tool to work well for both. They have never been a tool for AAA, but that is a niche market. (in terms of developers, not revenue). In fact it is better that the appeal to both. If someone starts small and becomes big, they can stick with the tool they know.

Partially. It was a slow process for us. We have several of our own engines, and frankly for a long time commercial engines weren't up the task of supporting our needs. We used Unity a bit and further adopted as it grew. And now, instead of maintaining our own engines, that effort can be spent on building tools for Unity.

Cost of the engine isn't really an issue (except it was expensive building our own), so if UE were actually cheaper it wouldn't really affect things. Multi-platform publishing is huge for us, and UE isn't there. But even if it were, there really isn't any reason to switch. We have a solid Unity pipeline and tools already in place and we have knowledge base to use Unity effectively. Changing engines would be time consuming and expensive (in time and tools). And Unity works great, and does everything we need it to. Since we are primarily mobile, the limits and challenges come from the platform, not the engine. UE offers nothing for us that we can't already do in Unity. At this point there no reason to even consider changing.

 

Okay I had to run earlier so couldn't elaborate why you shouldn't rely on FPS. But instead, profile properly to get the complete render time in ms. Here is a link that explains why. On my last title we shipped we didn't even bother looking at the fps counter but rather we looked at render times to make sure we were consistently below 16 ms. For instance, if you look at the fps counter in the unreal editor you might be like "Wow, this is really suck". But when you turn on the GPU profiler- "Oh CRAP!~! Slate is really fragging us! I better profile this outside of unrealEd!!!"

Note - this post isn't aimed at anyone in particular. I really didn't learn how to properly profile til later in my career myself. At my job there are plenty of guys that know their ways blindfolded around PIX / Razor (Sony playstation ps3/ps4/vita)

And no one needs to see your game assets. You just give them your profiles.

 

While I agree that FPS alone isn't a good indicator of anything, it's worth mentioning that you shouldn't rely solely on in-editor profiling in any case.

 

I think, and I could be talking out of my backside of course, that as long as the clueless gamer out there can say things like 'Aw Title X was so awesome, and it was made in Unreal Engine so Unreal must be awesome' then Unreal will have a perception advantage among gamers. Before UE4 you could always counter with a snort and a 'good luck getting unreal. You'll have to pay a gazillion for it!'. That's not true any more, so on a perception level, Unreal now has a perception advantage among the public.

That perception advantage is important, because it speaks to the regrowth in the indie sector. If everyone thinks "UE4 is the place to be" then the newbies will automatically reach for Unreal first, and not think about other solutions like Unity. And the newbies will invest their knowledge and experience into that eco-system. If the eco-system becomes Unreal dominated, then I think it will pull in the intermediates and eventually the pros who make more nuanced and competent calculations because the perception advantage will make it so that the assets go to the dominant engine. It will be so that both maintenance assets, ease-of-life assets, and art assets will be developed for the dominant engine to a large extent. So, it will be important for the intermediates and the pros to calculate how much easier their life would be if their next project were made using the dominant engine.

And then it doesn't so much become a democratisation of indie gaming any more. It becomes a one-party state, and in that situation it will be interesting to see what Epic does. Will they keep being as good as they appear to be? And this is why I think it's better for Unity to react sooner than later, before Epic has too big an advantage in the perception level.

 

Indeed. And as Unity's current main advantage over UE4 is mobile performance, that becomes $225 per month for those who would have more reason to stay. Unity cannot rely on that performance difference staying.

 

It seems to me that Unity's constant advantage across all platforms could be speed. If they can nail this, it would be awesome indeed. Speed of dev, speed of execution. And the visuals. I'm not asking for much it seems (!)

 

Thanks for the clarification .
Anyway, what I was trying to see are the different choices that someone can make when deciding for an Engine .

From what I see, a lot of people can choose Unity because it already has a process running with it and can not ignore the investment made in it.
But considering that, this link a conclucion to a paticular situation of each one, and of course must be taken into account in the personal choice of each.

When I mentioned that Unty could be becoming a tool of choice for medium and large companies , I meant purely an economic matter .

Beyond the technical characteristics of each engine, UE today is allowing to overcome the economic barrier to entry to a graphic engine of latest technology and full-featured, which unity set to 1500 dollars per seat for the basis version .

The investment of a small group of 3 developers with dreams of greatness is extremely expensive compared to the 60 dollars a month with possibility to cancel but continue working with the actual version of tools.
Now we can talk obout the 5% (and again it can be related to what I was saying about medium and large companies) , but that 5% is a lot of money for a big company that has lot of incomes plans and for which the initial investment in Unity is something easily overcome, but for a small group of INDIE developers , hobbyists , etc, that 5% is too little considering:

According to this topic, you need to bill more than $ 3,000 per quarter.
Allows pay the investment AFTER winning the money, this means lower barrier to entry, lower risk.

Now, if we tried to assume we have not put our bases in any engine, and we have to start from scratch.
What would be our choice?

Speaking just for me, and like the situation is today. I mainly choose UE mainly for the economic side. We could arguehours about technically which is better, or that more convenient becouse the Solid Asset Store etc etc, but the economic difference, and investment diference is simply huge.
In case Unity reconsider its offer, then I can sit and analyze in more detail what is more convenient for me, regardless of the economic side.

Again sorry for my English (I think I'll put in my signature so no need to repeat it any more: D)

 

The whole pricing of UE4 is cool, and the idea of more engines available at a level I can grasp is always good - but I love unity, I am not ready to just pack up and leave to another engine anytime soon. Plus the price of my Unity (for now) is free - so the price won't make a real impact on me until unreal goes free for indie. I will wait around for about a year or so and see how the big titles work out and how many kinks get ironed out before I commit any money to it, let alone worry about Unity going anywhere... But yeah I am keeping my eyes peeled on unreal to see how things go.

 

Not really, add the same UE4 post effects to any Unity game and it'll crawl to hes knees. If you are lucky enough it'll be equality slow or even slower. There's no magic trick in Unity (either UE4), they both feature a similar rendering pipeline (it'll be even more similar with Unity5 as it shares a deferred renderer), the more stuff you pitch to the gpu to process the more time it'll take to render.

 

To follow up on my previous post:
Still, it's true that current version of Unity is not really intended at heavy graphically intensive effects ( can be possible with lot of dirty hacks here and there though ) and that's why Unity is quite popular on the smaller apps (mobile, web, etc) while UE4 was build from the ground up to larger heavy graphically intensive applications. Unity 5 is a good step forward towards performance - graphically demanding applications and that's pretty awesome but to my knowledge it'll will always remain one (or even few) step(s) behind UE4. No matter how fast or hard they try will never catch up. One of the reason is that Unity spend quite too much time on non-core features such as service features, multiplatform support and even non-gaming or core related features while UE engineering put everyone on core features (graphics research, parallelisms processing, bullet prof core gaming framework, networking at the heart of the engine and what's not).
Still, I believe (and I think everyone agrees with me) that is not really a question about what tool does what and which one is better (they both have their pros/cons and are pretty good) but rather a pricing model question. Unity once upon a time democratized game development, Epic is now freeing game development (and democratizing it even more)! This is what Unity have to catch up, it have to catch up on licensing and pricing models, not really feature wise.