Unreal Engine 5 = Game Changer

Let's assume Nanite and Lumen are overhyped and will be of limited use. Okay?

And let's just say, that for 3d Console/PC games, Unreal and Unity are equivalent (which I strongly believe to not be the case, but let's just say).

With Unreal I pay nothing until well after / if my game is successful.

With Unity, on top of what we're paying monthly already, I need to pay 1800$ extra for each freelancer I want to take a look at my project at any moment. This has stopped me working with freelancers that didn't do enough Unity work to warrant getting a Pro license themselves.

We'd like to expand the studio at some point and we simply can't afford paying +1800$ extra for every freelancer that wants to take a look at the game.

So what's the choice here: Assuming capabilities equal (and again, they aren't), one engine requires nothing of me, if at all, until well after my game is out, the other is actively stopping me from hiring freelancers and is cold calling me about *detecting extra licenses in use under my IP* and asking for extra money.

 

More like
early 2021 - early version of the engine with stability similar to average Unity tech release
late 2021 - actuall usable version of the engine (don't mistake It with the Unity LTS version)

And stop dreaming about Unity doing anything to counter UE5. They have 1 year to achieve something that their bigger and better competitor has been developing for 3 years. It's not going to happen. They couldn't counter quixel takeover, and they can't counter something like epic mega grants.

Unity is loosing their ground for 3 years straight thanks to their business model and trying to do everything to not listen to their community.

Epic games with their unreal engine is on another level for years now. They understand how the game market works as a whole and are trying to do everything to have as much money from It as possible. Unity, on the other hand has found an easy way of farming developers pockets by abusing them either with asset store (Do you want any fancy feature UE4 just added? Pay or do It yourself, we aren't going to add It unless everyone will consider It a basic functionality) or with Pro version (dark theme + license Itself).

Unity as a company has literally copy pasted mindset of the EA. Guess who could be responsible for that.

 

When I see statements like this it just tells me Unity has sent a confusing message about what version of unity you should be using and what the different versions mean.

Currently

2018.LTS is production ready (Games to be shipped now and the next couple of months)

2019.TECH is Beta (Games to be shipped late 2020 early 2021 when LTS is released).. 2020 may be pushing it

2020... is alpha/beta and is for experimentation, trying out new features but not real development

As for packages previewed/verified I do not want to go there. (Some packages have been in preview for a long time and are very stable while others marked as verified need more development time)


Aside from that, I read the entire thread a lot of interesting comments, trolls, heartache, etc.


A lot of the new features coming to unity (SRP, DOTS, etc) are really nice they just need more development time, accurate documentation, and clear direction to be production ready. I have seen direction changes on some of these new features that has caused pain for many, but this is clearly related to the above of the confusing message from Unity about what versions of unity you should be using.

I also want to reiterate that Unity's core tech (Built in render, post processing) is very solid tech (stable) that works across many platforms and is even better when you focus to specific platforms. The tech may be much older but you can create great looking games with this tech.

To end
Unreal Engine is not going to kill Unity, just like lumberjack (cry-engine) did not kill Unreal engine. Comparing these engines (Unity and Unreal) is really a mute point. The engines are very similar in areas and very different in others.
Both engines are great we use both extensively!

 

Three years of full time development but over a decade of research.

 

Well, apparently paying for software you make money of is so old fashioned, that it is even blasphemy if publishers want money for their work.
I hope you guys okay with torrenting your own games as well in the extreme case when you're trying to sell it.

I guess this wasn't too clear, but I was talking about comments like these:

 

It doesn't really work like that. For one you can only throw so much money at creating new tech. There are only so many people you can throw at a problem before you actually make it worse. This is especially true with new tech where the codebase is relatively new and small. That's why startups focus so much on hire the best people but they never go super wide. This holds up in large companies also at the team level. Key technology is often worked on by a very small select group.

What you are asking for is for Unity to just ignore good solutions to well known problems and stick with the lowest common denominator. There is a huge space between that and where bleeding edge AAA is. It's a big curve and SRP/DOTS moves Unity most of the way up that curve. Where I think they stop is where they feel they can't also make the engine accessible to hobbyists.

In tech the bar is constantly being raised. Nobody can just stand still you do that you die. Nobody likes having to change but in this world it's the norm. I've been working in tech startups for 24 years now and the amount of learning new things hasn't really gone down over time. It doesn't matter if you are a professional or a hobbyist here you have no choice but to keep adapting and learning, or you get left behind.

 

Yeah, how dare we criticize a software's business model. We should be constantly paying monthly, continuously, for no benefit, NO QUESTIONS ASKED, or we run the risk of being mocked from people that don't actually have any personal stakes and don't really care, but really like looking down on other people while contributing nothing at all.

 

Ya this is a perfect illustation of how these things work in the real world. It's almost always just one or two people creating the core tech up to the point where you actually get it working. Go to companies like google/amazon it's the same deal. Like when I worked at Amazon years back guess what, their core tech teams were tiny. Talking to people there that I still know, it's the the same deal. It's why startups are even a thing, that small can still compete with big. Because innovation you can't just make it go faster by throwing more money and people at it.

 

This sort of thing has always been a red herring to me.

A lot of the problems I've seen from Unity over the years were not down to strategy and the big decisions, they were problems with implementation and driving things to a sufficient level of quality and maturity. Big issues with the 'last 10%' of getting stuff completed (which always turns out to be far, far more than 10% of the work, not an issue unique to Unity). Issues that frankly often reek of team management issues and related stuff such as morale, silos, churn rates, onboarding issues, too many vacancies etc. Stuff that isnt the sort of thing we can talk sensibly about in depth on their own forum.

I'm not happy with where they have ended up and how long it looks like its going to take them to get some of the newer systems and tech to a decent standard. I think I shall walk away completely and spend my time with some other engines that know how to deliver stuff that isnt always so half-baked. Unity remains attractive to me in a number of ways and so eventually I shall return to see how far they have progressed in areas that matter to me. Until then, I go and spend my time with engines that dont feel like they are deep in a quagmire of their own making.

 

OTOH, Unity has hired Seb Aaltonen, who has shipped probably the most impressive UE4 ray traced voxel and SDF rendered game, so it's not like they do not have employees who have done similar research. Whether as a company they can organise themselves enough to come up with some impressive* development out of that is a different story.

* Not to downtalk his work on HDRP, it's just not the sort of industry disrupting work we are seeing from Epic yet.

 

You're free to criticize. But paying for the software you're working with is not abuse. It is part of the normal business to pay for the tools you use. You can call it bad business model, but abuse? WTF?

WTF? Do you use the software or not? You do.

??? Do you care to expand on this?

And on this?

 

We don't know if DOTS will be a good solution in all aspects other than performance.

Tim Sweeney:

True, before Unity and Unreal pricing were kind of similar. In Unreal if your company made 200k you had to pay 5%=10k, in Unity that would be 10k/1800$ = 5.5 developers.

Now Unreal is free until $1mln per game/product.

Anyway price of using both engines is not that high, $1800 is 2%-10% of developer salary.

 

And how much is it for a freelancer that wants 2000$ for some sound design?

 

Yeah, but Its not the part of any human business model to keep behind stash of money something like dark mode. All of that because Unity knows their "Pro" product doesn't show any value so rather than doing anything for their consumer they decided to simply destroy eyes of the poorer part of the community. Well maybe in the process they will fall into the pit of "I have put into Unity too much time to switch to good tool" so they will save their health by only 1800/400 dollars per year? Lets also hope they wont find these damn hacks (which some of them aren't fully legal, but at least depenalized).

Oh and also, licence. It such an amazing thing. Do you want to buy licence for any shorter than 12 months? Good joke, not here.

 

Licensing models are always annoying, but what if your game earned $10million, Unreal would cost $500k, Unity would not. There are pros and cons either way...

Maybe Unity need to have no mandatory one year term for additional seats on a project so you can get it for one month for a contractor. That would be nice.

 

*sigh*

 

That changes if you live in a country where the local currency exchange rate to USD is high. Unity becomes more expensive and UE4 "cheaper".

Also, the UE4 royalties are on the gross income past $1 million. That first million is all yours (well, 70% of it after Steam et all collect their own fees).

 

No. For starters, it's 5% not 10% which would make it $500,000. That said you will only need to pay that amount if you can't be bothered to negotiate a custom license. Unlike Unity Technologies it's expected that you will want a custom license with Epic Games if and when you have high success.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/get-now/games

 

Yep sorry, i adjusted the price, still $500k is a lot.

I didn't know there were custom licenses. Thanks for that, although it sounds like it's not guaranteed to be cheaper... Do you know if they go cheaper for very successful projects?

 

Not 1mln but $0.45mln. In this case we would have to know how much access to Unity source costs.

 

People keep mentioning this but there is another facet that no one has mentioned. Epic Games waives the game engine royalties for sales made on their store.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/announcing-the-epic-games-store

 

I've lost track with that, did they eventually opened that train-wreck for the ordinary developers or you need to be invited?

 

Hasn't changed to my knowledge.

https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/about

 

Having dark mode as a premium feature is 2006-level cringe. I don't think it's abuse, but it's a pretty poor business decision.

 

The custom license is negotiated before releasing your project, you cannot change after releasing using the royalties license. It is cheaper than the 5% fee but requires you to have money to pay upfront. How much it costs depends on the scope of your game, the size of your team, projected sales numbers and such, so it's meant for studios that somewhat know what they are doing. Large publishers work with custom licenses only. They also have publisher-wide licenses, which allow publishers to release several games using UE4.

Unity also has custom licensing, BTW. That's how you get source code access, among other things.

 

You mean after prototyping and before the actual development starts. Otherwise you would be tight to the engine without a deal. That's a big no-no.

Honestly, I'm glad that their developers have more important things to do than moving the dark theme into the free tier. I have the Plus subscription (voluntarily, I actually like to pay for the software I'm using) and have to fight with the editor to switch back to the light theme (I actually prefer it, it's healthier and easier on the eyes in every way and every time) once in a while. So I guess we all have our burden.

 

Honestly, if this is a task taking more than a quick Jira ticket, I weep for their devops.

 

No, you have until actual release to make up your mind. When I say "scope", it's more about development size: a 5-10 people team making a game in one year gets a reduced rate compared to a 150-people team working on a three years project.

 

That and the splash screen (that has code to ensure that people don’t circumvent it which messes up normal splash screens on iOS), have always seemed so petty to me and the extra engineering needed for them is obviously a waste (and a waste of the user’s time).

 

You wouldn't happen to have a source for this would you?

 

Devops? I don't think they had too many devops until not too long ago. I would expect dragons in Unity core code, ancient knot-mess. People are asking why they don't do this or that, it would take a minute or so. But it is not true if you have 10 years worth of baggage on your shoulders. (and usually the same people are crying why the changes...)
There is a reason why I actually champion their effort to rewrite the majority of the engine and editor. Everything will be simpler, safer, better if you rewrite the mess you had a long time ago. (Yepp, software engineering manager is my day-job, I can relate to these things)

 

Not written down, sorry. Was told in person by both a licensing agent and an evangelist. You can also find the e-mail for their licensing department buried somewhere in their website.

Anyway, it makes sense: it would be cheating if you could simply waive away the royalties in the oddball chance your game explodes in a surprise success.

 

And efficiency, it's not just high end results, it's also a race to teh micro joule battery efficiency in mobile, though they market the more spectacular zillion bullshot.

 

There are ways to handle it like having royalties apply up to the point you finalize the custom license. If I had to guess it's not that they see it as cheating the system but rather that they can't be bothered to deal with it since it would require more than just looking at the value of the company, providing a basic estimate, and calling it done.

 

Just to make it clear: I'm not talking against Riccitiello. I just mentioned his name because of the interview.

I agree with your quality statement since it has a direct impact on my team's day to day work. Unfortunately, I don't agree with your view on the business side. In fact, any big tech company software development *is* business driven. The area your software targets determines what features have to be developed and what business model is used. And that's why Riccitiello's interview is so important: it shows where the future path is leading them and what this implicitly means for us game developers.

 

Folks...no matter how you want to put it, UE5 announcement was a huge blow to many game engines. Not just Unity.

Do you think Cryengine, Gordot will do any better? Not really. Sure, there are many reasons why these engines will not be gone the next month, but it is also true that Unreal will hold its crown for a good couple of years. UE5 licensing and its features top all known engines so far and releasing the engine in 2021 and in full in late 2021...that is a quick roadmap that will soon come knocking down on our doors...heck the DOTS and hybrid renderer system won't be ready in 2022 at this rate...and Unity's GI will most likely to be announced in 2021. In another word, Epic just made everyone look very stupid. "Our product is better and cheaper". Seriously, no one can compete under these premises.

Of course, given my C# background, I love Unity and I cringe at the thought of using Blueprint and C++ for simple tasks...but sometimes it is impossible to fight the tide when it is so big...

As for Unity devs, I know that you guys probably think going into a price war with Epic is a suicide...and to some point, I agree. But how long do you think Unity will hold its crown for mobile~AA range? Unreal will surely expand downwards, and free engines like Gordot will expand upwards with Unity stuck in the middle. Maybe this time, you guys need to strike first instead of getting hit and hiding back behind the dark mode...

 

"Better" is not an absolute concept. Better for what? and for who? would you use a free screwdriver for hammering nails? Each engine has its own market imho, including Godot and others. Unity has been trying to expand his (attempts that have -to some extent- backfired), but Unreal:

Spoiler

 

• Game Services deliver lobbies, matchmaking, peer-to-peer connectivity, player data storage, achievements and stats, leaderboards, game analytics, and player ticketing. More features are coming later, including voice chat. You can use these services together with your own account system, with platform account systems, or choose to use Epic Games accounts.
• Epic Account Services support cross-platform accounts, login, friends, and presence, and are interoperable with console account systems. Reach an audience of over 350 million players with 2.2 billion friend connections on over half a billion devices across seven platforms.

For Free? You can choose whatever you want about dark or light theme, for sure. It's your thing. But this for free? Unity doesn't even have these services.​

 

Absolutely great if that's what you're looking for, but some people might prefer ease of development over voice chat and built-in matchmaking. Would pick Unreal over Unity in a heartbeat if my project revolved around online features.

Thing is, Unity has been lately feeling thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread. I'm not sure they know who their market is.

 

I, too, prefer ease of development and love using Unity and prefer using it over UE. But as an example, there is something called Gameplay Ability System in UE4. I needed something similar in modularity, took me (a novice programmer) a month to implement. It's comes out of box. At least give me something back, damn.

 

As far as the tool is fit for your problem, all's fine. Sometimes built-in stuff falls short for a specific use case, and then your only option is to modify it or roll your own. In these cases (majority, at least in my experience), Unity feels much more simple and straightforward to me. But them again, I'm a coder, so my point of view is probably biased.

All I'm saying is that different people will choose different tools for different tasks, and there's nothing wrong with that. As long as a tool covers someone's necessities, it will have a place in the market.

 

Epics game services can be used with Unity. A little bit cheeky but as Unity have dropped the ball with online of late its a good move on Epics part.
A bit miffed Unity have not done something for Unity devs with Multiplay. It feels like Multiplay is a completely separate arm that is not linked to unity other than they own it. No cheap seats, no integration, it just feels like a missed opportunity.

For me Unity's best market is mobile. If you watch recent Unite keynotes they talk often about how many games are mode with Unity in the mobile sector. The work they have done for mobile dev's has been awesome. As someone else mentioned in another thread, IAP's, Ad integration etc is a breeze and it was a smart biz move on Unity's part to create Unity Ad's.
The current problem Ad's might have is during the 2008 recession the bottom fell out of this market (I was an early adopted of mobile Ad's so I recall the pain) and with us heading towards another one thanks to a certain virus it will be interesting to see how that revenue stream holds up.

 

The thing about the Unreal presentation is what I heard in context of making a 3D game...

- put lots of things on the screen and don’t worry
- add great lighting and don’t worry
- have dynamics that interact with your game eg. Water, falling rocks, flocks of birds
- have a character rigging system that understands the geometry
- be able to use it for large and small areas
- have it scalable

Now if this actually materializes/is reality is a different thing, but it is a compelling story...

What is unity’s story? Should I:
- use dots to put lots of things on the screen (eg megacity), potentially in conjunction with the mentioned new terrain system (sometime)
- use the heretic character as an example of character rigging
- use Kinematica for animations
- use animation rigging for ik
- use dots to create a third person controller (eg third person sample)
- in which pipeline if I want to make it scalable?
- not sure what to use for lighting...

I feel there are lots of cool looking bits and pieces but I am unsure of how they are all meant to fit together

This is where the Unreal video nailed it

Would be interested to see a sample from Unity where they demonstrate all these things working together.

Edit: A sample that works in a standard version of Unity - not modified like most of the previous Unity demos

 

I'm not a game only developer though, and in most technology areas there is plenty of crossover between improvements that help the non-game developers and game developers alike.

Honestly, when I review my experience of Unity over the last decade, one big conclusion jumps into my mind and is impossible for me to shift away from. Unity are a company that suffered from massive growing pains many years ago, and that they never managed to get a proper handle on these things, they just kept growing and the issues kept going. I'm not at all against their growth into other areas, thats fine, the issue is not being able to deal with growth in general within the company, and leaving unresolved issues to fester over years and undermine the great work of people in absurd and demoralising ways. These are not trivial problems to fix, especially when they've been unresolved for so long.

 

Lumen can run on mobile???
are you sure? I couldn't find any official claim about that

 

As for features right now, I remain very impressed with some large swathes of HDRP and I think that VFX Graph is excellent, with nice tools & UI compared to Niagara on UE4. The flipside of this is that I get disappointed by the pace of progress with these packages past a certain stage, I always seem to manage to set my expectations wrong in terms of when to expect some missing functionality to arrive, no matter how much I try to moderate such expectations. Development momentum seems to be lost with various packages in Unity in ways I continue to find disturbing.

The new GI solution for Unity seems to be on roughly the same timetable as Unreals efforts in this regard, though much too early to say more than that at this stage. In recent years there have been plenty of times where both engines were delivering stuff at similar times, there is often a stalemate with certain feature parity, but often with big differences in how production ready and 'compatible with the rest of the system' stuff is. Nanite is something where I'm less clear whether Unity will attempt to deliver something similar in the same calendar year.

My recent reevaluation of UE4 left me quite impressed with how far their in-editor modelling tools have come. As opposed to Probuilder, where I read the changelog for the last 18 months and wonder why this is yet another Unity package that seems to be going nowhere interesting in a hurry.

Sky/atmosphere is another area where both engines have been trying to improve things, and I will be very interested to see how the volumetric clouds in UE 4.26 compare to the early preview version thats in 4.25. In 4.25 the potential is there but the performance is not at all (and they dont claim it is). I'm out of date with regards whether Unity are attempting something similar, my expectation based on competitive history between the engines is that they are but I have little idea what the clouds bit will be like yet.

Long term I would like to keep both Unity and UE4 in my life. Because despite all the areas of overlap, there are some important differences between the two in my mind. UE feels like grappling with a powerful but narrow game engine, Unity feels more like a development environment/platform to me in many ways these days, and I dont think thats a bad thing. But for various reasons I've ended up concluding that if I want an environment to load Megascans and Speedtree assets into without hassle or incompatibility issues, I should just stop bashing my head against a brick wall with Unity or assuming that the promised land must be just around the corner. Because it rarely is, and this pains me, but since I cannot control the situations involved I should act according to this reality and judge engines and the companies behind them on their prior form.

 

This is the game engines scenary for 2021: UE5: Nanite and Lumen for free, Unity 2020: New Dark theme UI for $40/month.

 

no point comparing the two engines 1:1 like that. As mentioned pages ago, one has budget in millions, the other is billions. It's no comparison.

But unity does fill a certain niche the other can't, just like me, an absolute nobody in gaming industry, can make a certain type of game that EA cannot. So if you have use for the tool use it, otherwise don't.

 

How to kill your product and reputation in few steps, presented by Unity:

Note that enhancer doesn't bypasses but carefully replaces all style sheets and icons with dark ones. My version did something similar but instead it took light icons/stylesheets and inverted all colors.

Now both won't work anymore.

 

So this has come up a few times. I'm in the boat where I don't necessarily care about the theme, per se. The default gray theme doesn't really bother me that much. I know there are some shenanigans (such as this) that you can do to get something like the dark theme. My problem is more that they are adamant that this is a premium feature. My Visual Studio Code is using Fira Code font for some sweet ligatures, a dark material-ui theme. It looks great. VS Code is free. I was able to click my extensions button and get these features for free. Because this is 2020, and not 2006. So while I do think that it's wack that your fix no longer works, my main issue is that it's even necessary in the first place. We should not have to pay $40 per month to get a worse customization experience than almost every editor out there today. It's absurd. Honestly, there is something intrinsic with the foolishness that makes me not want to use the product. It's like charging to use the bathroom in a restaurant.

I use Unity for game jams, so paying a subscription fee for it isn't really something that adds any value. And even if I did, I would never pay for "dark mode + splash screen customization." The fact that those are considered premium features is just asinine to me. I've paid hundreds of dollars to Unity for assets (that kinda saddens me because most game jams won't let you use premium assets anyways lol, but whateves, the developers of these assets are awesome and I don't mind supporting them, and Unity gets a fair cut, so no one can say I've put no money down.) Why not make themes an asset store thing? People can make them for free, people can sell them. I really hope it's "guh editor hard" happening behind the scenes, and not that this continues to be a legitimate business decision. Because if it is, if they truly think "editor having customizable colors and fonts is something we will charge money for" is the hill they're willing to die on, then I'll probably just use Godot for 2d stuff and Unreal for 3d stuff.