UE5

That doesn't sound right.

An example of Lock-in is Oculus Quest or Microsoft Windows DirectX.
"Oh, you don't want Facebook account? No quest for you. Enjoy your paperweight.".
"Oh, you want Direct X 10/11? You have to upgrade your system. You don't want to? No directx for you".

That is highly unfair.

However, "we'll waive royalties if you use our store" sounds pretty reasonable in comparison.

Steam has very unclear and even hypocritical stance when it comes to adult content and "controversial" titles.
Basically, they seemed to claim that "anything goes" with curation removal.
In practice, when somebody gets sufficiently offended, they chicken out and pull the title or censor it. At the same time nightmare fuel content that is far worse than whatever it is they pulled remains on the store.
That's largely due to cultural differences, but that's a thing.

Multiple games has been removed (apparently thosuands) due to multiple reason.

 

Love how on topic it is, I guess that's why Unity feels OK about leaving a thread open about competing products. Absolutely goes nowhere

 

Waiving the need to pay Unreal Engine royalties if you choose to sell on their platform is merely their way of leveling the playing field.

Exactly. Why close a thread and receive negative feedback for it when they can simply give us rope and watch us happily hang ourselves with it?

 

There's a ton of useful informaiton in there, although the thread seems to bee losing its steam at this point.

@EternalAmbiguity
The whole talk about Lock in largely revolves about reasonable and unreasonable demands from the user.

For example, "if you use our store, we'll waive royalties" and "you can use this for free, but only in our product" is reasonable enough, because you still have an option to use alternative service. That's not really a lock-in.

But let's say you're developing a game in an engine X, and one year into development you receive a letter.
"We're removing free license, if you want to continue using our product, pay up.
Additionally we've put all your files onto our clouds, and you can no longer access them unless you pay up.
Once you decide to continue subscribing, kindly sign an agreement that forbids you from using any other engine in next 10 years".

That's the ultimate vendor lock in. Good chunk of "saas on the cloud" services likely falls into this category, because the only thing they want is to lock into their account, just so your data ends up in their storage and then you can't leave, meanwhile their cloud offers nothing to you and its only purpose is to chain you to their service.

 

What else is there to say? "Unreal good, Unity bad" is about the extent of how these threads go.

That was my initial interpretation as well, but the examples I see listed there don't all fit that definition (the Microsoft example is one where people still "have a choice" but the dramatic difference between choices is what pushes the customer and creates the lock-in effect).

While I'm also generally against this, the word hypocritical doesn't apply, unless Steam's going out of their way to criticize other entities for censure, which I haven't seen. In addition, this isn't Steam doing "whatever the hell they want" - you yourself say that it's related to public outcry or things that are still not really socially acceptable, like "anime" style games (especially VNs). Furthermore an Epic exec is on record, as of a couple weeks back, as saying "I don’t support sexualized content of any sort" so they certainly won't be providing "competition" in this area.

Spoiler

That's what MangaGamer is for I guess.

Someone not being the dominant force in the market doesn't automatically excuse their behavior. To use a more clear-cut example, if Steam is telling developers they can't lower their prices on other stores, it's anti-competitive behavior regardless of Steam's size. And if Epic is telling developers they can't lower their prices on other stores, it's anti-competitive behavior regardless of Epic's size and regardless of whether or not we can say "it's just them leveling the playing field."

 

What does this have to do with the royalties for the game engine? I'm completely fine discussing anti-competitive behaviour but if you're going to make statements about it I'd prefer if you didn't immediately shift to a different angle as soon as someone challenges you on your statement. I like being able to follow discussions after all.

 

I'd prefer if you didn't avoid quoting my direct response to your "challenge" (my first sentence) to accuse me of shifting the goalposts, and as such I'll leave it at this.

I made the assertion that a company reducing the royalties for their engine is anti-competitive behavior.
You said that behavior is "merely their way of leveling the playing field."
I said "levelling the playing field" does not excuse anti-competitive behavior. I gave an example of another instance of anti-competitive behavior, purporting to show that it is still anti-competitive regardless of the size of the entity engaging in it (and also to reference the example about Steam brought by someone else in this thread).
------------------------------------reducing royalties for use of one's own engine on one's own store
Anti-competitive behavior⤭
------------------------------------forbidding lower prices in other stores

Cheers.

 

Reducing royalties for the use of a specific engine is not anti competitive. Because if a competitor so desired, they could strike a deal, where if you promote the competing engine, say with a splash, they'll offset the costs.

 

Nothing in that response stood out to me as an argument against my point.

No. You may be wording it that way now but your original wording wasn't anything like that at all. Instead you gave an example that had nothing in common with the statement I was arguing against. Namely that Unreal Engine games only needing to pay 12% is somehow anti-competitive against Unity games only having to pay 12%.

Incidentally I would love to have proof that this is being performed by Epic Games. I'm not a slouch when it comes to research and yet I found nothing suggesting they forbid lower prices in other stores.

 

My first sentence was an argument against your point: "levelling the playing field does not excuse competitive behavior." It's fine if you disagree with that argument, but that's independent from it being an "argument."

Yes, actually. The portion of the post you originally quoted:

The thesis/assertion of that statement is that "X" is anti-competitive behavior.

Your reply:

Either this was a non-sequitor or you were disputing my assertion regarding anti-competitive behavior, by explaining how it wasn't anti-competitive (because it's "merely their way of leveling the playing field").

My reply:

Continuing from my initial assertion regarding anti-competitive behavior, and what I assumed was your response to that assertion, my first sentence replies to your argument: something being done to "level the playing field" doesn't excuse that behavior. It doesn't make it non-competitive.

To show an example of that third point, I introduced the scenario AcidArrow referenced earlier, where Steam is being accused of forbidding developers from having lower prices on other stores. That's why I mentioned Steam there first--because there is, ostensibly, evidence of them doing so, and because it was mentioned in this thread so that would likely jog the memory of anyone who saw the initial post. I extended that same scenario to Epic as an example of my rebuttal - Epic forbidding developers from having lower prices on other stores (like Steam has been accused of) would be anti-competitive behavior, regardless of whether or not they were "merely levelling the playing field." Similarly, Epic lowering the royalty percentage for use-of-their-engine-combined-with-their-store would be anti-competitive behavior, regardless of whether or not they were "merely levelling the playing field."

It's possible you weren't giving a explanation for why Epic's behavior would not be anti-competitive by your use of "merely their way of leveling the playing field." If so, the fault is mine for assuming that was an explanation.

Edit - I just edited this post to include the word "third" near the beginning of the second to last paragraph.

 

The things Steam are 'getting away with' are swiping 30% of revenue and letting virtually anything into the store.

I say 'getting away with' not in the illegal sense but in the sense of not having to do better because of lack of real competition.

I think this is bad for devs (for obvious reasons) and also gamers since devs are always one non-hit away from bankruptcy after getting gouged, and creative risk taking is well, very risky. There's also rampant misuse of the early access system as a way to create some kind of margin for error.

I already said, the gamers are the ones who really create Steams monopoly. They don't want to install another launcher, and they'd rather not do that than give some breathing room to devs they depend on for good games.

Anticompetitive behaviour comes in different shapes and sizes. Offering exclusivity in return for money is hardly anticompetitive, no one is obliged to sell everywhere or in someone's favorite store. Especially when it seems to be necessary to break gamers out of complacent habits.

What I find much worse, and far more destructive to the entire game industry, is gouging the devs who keep it going and burying products under an avalanche.

But as I've already said, I have no moral accusation to level at any company, every single one would be happy with a monopoly and thats ok. I just want to see competition work its wonderful, magical spell to straighten things out, and it has arrived in the form of Epic. If they manage to succeed, the whole industry will be better off. Not just because of what they offer, but what other companies are pressured into offering too.

 

This speaks volumes. And you can only can get away with it in the entertainment industry where every single product is a natural monopoly.

 

When was the last time any Unity feature felt deeply integrated into the engine?

I can not remember.

Everything feels super tacked on.

Every recent Unity feature feels slapped together, put on the package manager then forgotten about. (and often the employee that designs the feature leaves the company and then no one picks up the slack).

The UI / user facing aspects are always inconsistent, they feel like they were designed in a vacuum with no one overseeing and ensuring they have shared design sensibilities. Once you get used to using a Unity feature, 0 know-how transfers to another feature since they have completely different internal logic. There's no Unity way of doing things that once you get, kinda gives you a leg up when using another similarly designed feature.

And nothing is robustly integrated. Every new feature only plays well with an absolute minimum set of other features and that's it. Oh you wanted to use feature X? Then forget about 70% of what the engine has to offer.

This is even greatly exacerbated by Unity's refusal to properly deprecate features. They can't, since to do that, the new features should cover most of the previous use cases and also be superior in performance and usage (and also, gasp, they may need to create a migration tool). You can say this is exacerbated because they are scared of breaking existing users' workflows, but other times they have absolutely zero problem with deprecating Enlighten without providing a replacement. So it seems like an excuse to me.

If new features had crystal clear benefits people would migrate willingly, but all new features come with caveats "well, the old was is a bit faster 50% of the time, and it's simpler to use", "you can use the new one and it saves some memory, maybe, we're not sure, but the workflow is 10x more complicated and needs 10x more code".

So what we end up getting is similar features that are at best sideways steps, and the older features instead of fading away, they become some sort of secret weapon that Unity themselves praise in Unity talks about them being "an important part of our toolbox".

When was the last time something happened like that to Unity? I'll tell you, it was never. Almost always it's slower and then we have the typical excuses, "well it has more features now, so it's slower, there's more overhead".

And the editor experience has been in free fall for many years, and I feel like they've actually tried to improve things for the editor for 1 whole year (after 5 years of F***ing it up) and they feel like that's enough (even though it has barely started to pay off). It doesn't feel like it's a priority that is up there constantly. It's a thing they post about on the blog about doing, then they do it for a year and then it's done. Why should they keep caring about the editor feeling good to use?

But the most damning thing of all is: there are no more complete sets of decently usable features and workflows in the engine. Let's forget porting older projects to newer Unity. Let's say you're starting a new project.

Let's say you want to start development on a URP based, new input system, OpenXR, VR game. The moment you do something slightly more complicated than a small example scene, things in the workflow fall apart, features are missing, things don't work. Essential elements simply don't exist.

Unity is a hodge podge of features, some new, some old, some legacy, some deprecated, some "production ready" AND NO ONE is interested in making sure there are enough of them that play well together and that there is any consistency between them.

And then you have Unreal, where you open it, and Nanite is like a whole new LOD system and to use it you just click a few checkboxes and then it works. And if for some reason you don't like it, you uncheck the boxes and that's that.

If Unity implements anything Nanite like, you can count it will for sure be like "but it requires using the Hybrid renderer package that is in preview, and text doesn't work with it, and it doesn't really work on half the supported platforms and HDRP support is upcoming but it's not here yet. Now please buy a subscription to PIXYZ and Artengine and Collaborate".

 

The "gamers depending on devs" is a very bold thing to say. In fact, its other way around since videogames are luxury, not a nessessity. Epic store succeeding will only mean replacing the (debatable, mind you) natural monopoly with worse intentional monopoly. And nothing will force them to keep the pretense of "devs above all" should they become the dominant force on the market. Not saying they'll nessessary raise the cut to 40% or something, but handouts to devs in forms of exclusivity deals will definitely stop.

 

I think this is pushing it too far, it's fair to discuss other similar tech to unity, how it works, but posting a video tutorial about a feature of a competitor in their forums is a bit too much imo.

 

The examples are also a kind of vendor lock in, although less obvious one.

If you have a humongous application written in windows api, for example, you ARE stuck with windows and you ARE locked in. Because porting it to non-windows system is going to be impossible, so your only choice is to pray to Elder Gods that your application works in wine.

By the way, Microsoft used to plant lock-in bear traps in their compiler code. For example, C++ has a function called strcpy. That one is not technically safe. So at some point of time, the compiler used to offer a safe function called strcpy_s, which was secure, but also wasn't a part of C++ standard at that time (it was made optionally available in C++11), so you start using this, and you get tied with vendor-specific code.

That's one of the reasons why people fight for open standards. If you have OpenGL supported on multiple platform, in case of issue with windows, you can leave to another vendor. If you're using DirectX, you're stuck.

It kinda does. They initialy give impression that anything goes, then go back on their word.
And "outcry" is highly hypocritical by nature. Because people see one thing and demand it gone while something far more horrifying/unacceptable remains on the store.

That's hypocrisy. Or at least inconsistency in behavior.

 

I'm not advocating forcing anyone to do anything. I'm advocating sellers being able to control their business and decide where their product is sold, and general competition pressuring companies to offer better terms in their own self-interest.

Just take a step back and consider how much sense it would make for the Epic store to hand 60% of their profits back to devs, and then allow them to sell on another platform that has basically monopolized the market? There is zero logic in that, except the logic of failure. How could they survive? I feel like the economics of the issue are completely obscured by the emotional response to a company restricting the choice of customers, without realizing that Steam's sheer size has effectively restricted choice to one store already, when there could be many, competing to offer better products and services.

You are right, and it's interesting that you brought it up, since if every product is a natural monopoly, then trying to force the product to be sold on multiple platforms in a way that either reduces or adds risk to the expected revenue of the creator, and prevents them from exercising their choice of exclusivity, is simply an attempt to reduce that monopoly.

 

I never said that gamers 'depend' on devs for anything except the availability of good, high quality games. And you are right, I don't trust blindly that Epic will always be doing what it's doing. But if they stand alongside Steam, they will have to stay competitive.

It's necessary to separate the Epic identity, and the Steam identity, and any aspect of kind intentions, from the simple fact of the current situation and how it has shaped the actions that are taking place within it right now. One might say that Epic has been forced to offer these good terms, simply to compete. So be it! That's the way it should be. The beauty of competition is that companies can be entirely self-interested, and the outcome can be very good for customers.

 

There may be good outcome, or there may be not. That's why I think that it is better to remain reasonably skeptical, and not to go along with Epic's "f*ck gamers" stance. Not sure it will ever go right for them.

I can understand game developers trying to exploit Epic exclusivity deals for money. It is when devs say it is about "health of the industry" or other idealistic BS, then it somewhat ticks me off. The best option would be to somehow create an "Epic bait" title without generating bad PR. No idea how to achieve the second condition though. If you do not market the game for other stores at first, Epic won't bother buying out exclusivity. If you do, you'll alienate good chunk of playerbase when the deal is made.

 

Skepticism doesn't produce results.

I don't see any substantial strategies here.

There's nothing idealistic about competition or wanting to have a healthy market to sell games in. You're getting ticked off by the wrong things. If you're a dev, you should be getting ticked off by Steam gouging you out of 30%. You should be getting ticked off by the idea that making gamers a little bit more comfortable is worth having a noose around your neck.

I haven't heard any of the skeptical crowd even mention Epic giving back 60% of their profits to developers. What company do you know that does that? Does it even register? They are willing to take all sorts of risks that will put developers in a better place, and they get nothing but ineffectual, generic skepticism.

It's one thing to value your customers and question the short and long term impact of the tactics used by certain companies, but the truth is that gamers in general don't value your skeptical moralism. They value their own comfort, they want to sit there on Steam and enjoy the circus of struggling devs and pass judgement in the reviews.

There are gamers out there who want my game, who will trust me to make the right decision about how to make it, market it, and sell it, and who will value it in terms of how much enjoyment it actually gives them. It is only to them, who show a bit of loyalty to me, that I will give any in return. If there's not enough of these customers to make a living selling games, then it's time to move on.

 

I didnt mean you personally; had no idea if you consider exclusivity or no. So not going to unpack your points any further, while its tempting. Fine, I wish that it will work for you and there is at least a bit of truth behind Epic propaganda.

 

At this point I would say the choice of engine greatly depends on what you are making. Any kind of photo-realistic game that falls into a genre would be tons easier in UE, with basically everything you need built-in and just works. Currently, having C# in Unity means that I am comfortable making just about anything with no limits other than my time. For a NPR look or a game not in a classic genre, installation, kiosk or a lot of other things I would still choose Unity.

However, the above point is really true. I'm currently working on two projects, one landscape building oriented and I'm giving UE a spin for that. The other is heavily UI focused and I need to train new designers to help me with it. What UI system should I even use in Unity? Most designers are familiar with a CSS workflow, so UI Toolkit might be good, but it's a lot more code and not as intuitive. Worse, I recall there are certain runtime limitations that I recall and I'm afraid I'll only discover those deal-breakers at the end of the project. uGUI is OK, but definitely could have used some attention over the years.

Normally, I would just go where I think the company is going but honestly, it's quite hard to say what UI Unity recommends at this point. Unity does provide a chart in the docs that is an attempt at helping users make a decision but it's actually not that helpful. uGUI is good at this, UIElements is good at that, but beware it's not finished. Please, just tell us what UI system is best! It's your product!

 

My first inclination is to agree with this, and in fact I typed out a couple statements saying as much, but then I compared it to the other instance of anti-competitive behavior already mentioned. How is exclusivity for money (aka forbidding selling on other stores) any less anti-competitive than forbidding lower prices on other stores? I guess you could say that one only happens to specific games while the other is a blanket requirement, but the action itself seems similar.

I've already derailed enough so I'll just agree that competition is good.

 

To quote the FTC, "most exclusive dealing contracts are beneficial because they encourage marketing support for the manufacturer's brand."

In the article they focus on the example that selling the product may require certain knowledge or services to sell it, and that's very applicable to the game industry as not everyone has said knowledge, access to the services, or the available time required to promote and sell their games.

What you see as anti-competitive is just a contract to get a game marketed and sold by someone that feels they can't do it adequately themselves. If we were going to condemn stores for getting exclusive access to the game then we would have to condemn publishers too for being the only company allowed to publish them.

The article does mention that some companies use this in anti-competitive ways but that doesn't change the fact that simply having exclusive contracts is not automatically anti-competitive.

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/com...ws/dealings-supply-chain/exclusive-dealing-or

 

I think there's a difference between paying for the development of a product and subsequently owning it, and paying for the exclusivity of an existing product one did not develop. However I definitely acknowledge that payment for exclusivity can go towards further development (for the same game or another by the same company), in which case it's indirectly improving the market.

Harder to argue that for forbidding lower prices on other stores I imagine.

 

I saw a Twitter thread recently about it, saying it's very underrated for games (it seems it has the best vertex painting toolset). It's the very first 3D software I used, before Maya and Blender, and I think we don't hear a lot from it because while it seems to be efficient for game dev, the whole software UX feels really old.
I think UX is the most important thing coming from a software. If you're going to use it everyday, you'd better have fun using it.

 

It's widely used in game dev and the industry, but typically only AAA. It has nothing to do with fun factor and everything to do with having the most plugins, historically. It may be old but it's still one of the biggest AAA userbases.

 

FromSoftware uses it last I checked

 

What engine does FromSoftware use?

 

3ds Max is quite alive and kicking - at least Autodesk's engagement in its development is and improvements stability and performancewise ( especially high poly ) have quite skyrocketed over the course of the last few of releases.
Only improvements still missing are a serious look into its dated animation tools, but again the existing tools work ( with the usual quirks and workarrounds required in such an old application)
I think it's installbase in gamedev companies though has been draining blood seriously for some time now, given all the blender hype and it's really great progress

 

Their own.

 

Yes, but also their PSVR title (Deracine) from ~3 years ago was UE4 I think.

 

Blizzard uses Unity for their odd titles but mostly it's their own engine. I think nanite will probably win over from software in the end though since they've historically had to put way too much work into their environments (from memory of their old interviews).

I think that kind of env construction is where nanite will win many developers of all shapes and sizes including industry (especially including industry).

Thing is Unity didn't even consider hlod or even lod being worthy of first party support and people need to understand Unity's philosophy vs other engines. It's the tool for the job. If you're into asset store or rolling your own then Unity is the way to go. If you're into a battle tested commercial solution which is not random-customer designed then unreal is the way to go.

 

I think this is about what my experience has summarized as well.

With unity the general advice is usually "roll your own." But the whole reason I am using the "easy" game engine is to avoid that. I think people like to flex more than help sometimes.

So with unity I rely on asset store tools which often times are great but when you throw seven render pipelines into the mix - and like others said, once you get beyond flappy bird clones - it becomes almost impossible to make things work together. This works with that but not with this. Entire production becomes a game of making compromises. And obviously if I buy tools from the store that means I'm not in a position to build them myself.

For a non-technical designer who just wants to make a game and has no desire to get any deeper in technicals than I need to accomplish the job, it seems so far like Unreal makes that easier. A lot easier. Which is the opposite of what common wisdom here seems to be.

I think now the way I would summarize it is, "Unity can be a more flexible engine for making 2d or non-graphics intensive games if you know what you are doing enough to modify the engine and create your own tools." That is far from "the easy engine" which people make it out to be.

 

With asset store you're usually relying on tools people invented - usually by amateurs who have never, ever released a game. Very few exceptions to this.

Which is why 9 out of 10 of the assets will barely work and break down horribly past their unique demo constraints, especially performance sensitive ones. Then you have to wonder if it works with which version of unity, which settings, which srp and so on...

Leaving no option but to roll your own, which equates to UE being much, much faster to build and finish big games with. Unity is tooled for mobile, and their blog mostly reflects this, historically.

You can have all the tech you like but if your customers can't use it or deploy with it... it doesn't effectively exist. So it's fine to make book of the dead or heretic demos but there's no tooling for any of that which could ever make it past demo stage, and Unity knows it.

 

Unity could bang out something like nanite - a demo of it - within a month with the staff they have and the source they can now read from. They could. But nobody would be able to use it effectively in big finished games, without at least 100 staff working for 2 years exclusively on the tooling, integration, documentation, fixes and QA.

That's the real cost and why tooling is more important than tech.

 

yeah it seems that unity has taken the approach many indie devs want to take: make 1/4 of a game and throw it on EA, hoping that jesus booms down and blesses you with millions because you "worked really hard."

too much thinking gamedev is get rich quick and not enough people enjoying game dev because its really fun.

 

They were using in-house or propietary engine for DS3/Sekiro, I believe.

However, there were mentions online that they're investigating Unreal. Those mentions could be a hoax.

 

I would be okay with "rolling your own" being the go-to solution for features I really care about.

What I'm not okay with, is for features where I don't want to spend too much time and I would be fine with "baseline" quality, I often reach for Unity's official features and more often than not I find them to be a combination of un-intuitive, limited, sloppy and slow.

 

yeah i agree. I mean there is a point where you go beyond common things everybody would need and it's reasonable to expect to roll your own there if you really need it.

For me I don't like to work with low quality tools and I don't think it's conducive to doing high quality work to scrape by with stuff held together with duct tape.

Like others mentioned i couldn't care less about the latest tech - but I do care about using high quality tools and too often in unity the tools that i use 5,000 times a day just aren't nice to use. I guess the productive thing to do would be painstakingly log all of this but when I see a debacle like connect that really saps my motivation to try and help out. Why help somebody who clearly doesn't care?

I can't really even blame unity, it kind of seems appropriate. Like the way trump is the quintessential image of the ugly american, unity is the quintessential engine of the wanna-be indie dev - the kind who wants to throw a bunch of non-committal junk onto the store hoping just by chance they make it big. The only thing they seem to care about is money, there is no love for the craft, they treat customers like prey, they are always following trends, not developing new ones.

Maybe it was different before but that's what it looks like to me now.

 

It was briefly mentioned in an interview that they were investigating VR using Unreal.

https://fextralife.com/fromsoftware-learning-unreal-engine-will-return-to-games-were-known-for/

 

When the asset is used in just one single game, they have technically released a game.

But on-topic, Nanite is amazing. Goes back to the idea I had myself when learning ray-tracing. To see it in action blows my mind how powerful hardware can be with the right code.

Unity will have a lot on their plate to catch-up but hey, it's better competing against a good rival than having none at all.

 

Not really, no.

 

Speaking of VR, due to GPU shortage I'm stuck with 3gb GPU that is not technically supported, but works through Virtual Desktop.

So.. trying to use Virtual Desktop on both engines.

Unreal: Works out o the box, although I'm pretty sure it thinks I'm using Vive controllers. Sadly, they only provide Blueprint template for VR, but that one can be butchered and changed.

Unity: Uuuuhhh.... works, but requires a very non-obvious workaround.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-editor-and-virtual-desktop.881449/#post-6792485

 

Since everyone says nanite is that good and AAA move from their own engine to UE5. What's gonna happen next?
Epic Games win and become monopoly over game engine development.
No one gonna make engine anymore.
I feel like no one even care to take a look into the details of nanite that many graphics engineers try to crack.
I think this is the end. This is the hopeless of all and people just let Epic Games win. The whole industry will be collapsed and crash again. This is the lowest of lowest. Well, I'm making game on my own way. No release on EGS! I'm not support completed monopoly likes this. This is not competition at all. And they release free game so no one want to buy game anymore too. Just wait for free game from Epic. My friend purchase frostpunk for a while he use his save money. Now, it's free. Game is devalued by this strategy and only popular game get a chance to be on EGS. No one want to buy game too. They're waiting for Epic to give them a free game. This is the worst time to make a video game after all!

 

Lol ... Controversial opinion I would say. Freelancers, people who work in out-sourcing companies and generally everyone who doesn't solo develop a game, also haven't released a game because they only made fragments of it?
What kind of logic forms your opinion?

 

I don't think people are saying that.

What? You making some leaps here.

Uhhh...?

Ooof, more leaps of logic. That's not what he said, and hiring a freelancer to do something in your game is not equivalent to buying something from the asset store and putting it in your game.

 

For example, X years from that moment, a paradigm shift happens in graphics, and implementing it into Unreal engine becomes unfeasible.

That could be anything. For example, instead polygons, rendering now has to be done with qlorps. What's a qlorp? Why, that's a trivial thing that describes object's shape using 50 dimensional qubit based hyperscalar, which allows us to utilize power of next gen optoquantum processor to the fullest and finally solve global illumination problem for good.

Okay, that's far fetched.

However, there are bunch of corner cases, where unreal engine will not be the best fit, and those can spawn new engines.

Few things I can think of:
1. 2d in general. (Yeah, paper 2d existed, once upon a time, but...)
2. Non-euclidian geometry.
3. Higher dimensional space (n-dimensional with N > 3).
4. Portals and graph based worlds.
5. Anything that multiple worlds running in parallel (can be solved with a plugin, but apparently only partially)
6. Anything that requires completely custom lighting solutions. (Unreal rendering stack is not very hackable)
7. Huge worlds (solar system scale and galatic scale is going to be a pain, and will require a workaround)
8. Truly huge number of objects (can you render 7 billion people in one frame?)

 

Unreal also released Metasounds, which is something that anyone who cares about audio has been asking for since forever.

Personally, I think Interactive audio tools are more powerful than a better workflow for visual art and significantly better graphics.
The latter is something that happens constantly, and given priorities is absolutely inevitable anyway...

Unity could have made metasounds. But they let unreal do it instead. They ignored audio for years, trying to catchup in other areas, and now they are behind in an area where they used to be slightly ahead. Nothing has happened with audio since unity 5. Only paid assets like the Helm VST port, or the Procedural Music Generator have advanced audio in unity.

 

Unity "did" metasounds in a way, it's called DSP graph and was all the fanfare along with the megacity demo.
It's still somewhere in the middle of the feature limbo that unity is.
And that's the main problem, no one really trust unity to deliver, and even inside unity doesn't seem to have a clear direction.
How many people are using DOTS, how many people are using the hybrid renderer ? Unity was working on HLODs for a long time:
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/AutoLOD

That's the problem with unity, they talk a lot, make a demo (with a bunch of workarounds) and just call it a day. You can't blame users for not trusting them. Specially since single developers in the asset store have been running around circles a company valued in the billions.
I'll regain some faith when they release the standard third person controller they have been working for years now (read that again, it's a game engine that can't get out a third person controller after working on it for years).