[Crinus]

This is a common mistake people make. If you make a custom engine you do not need to beat what is already out there since you are certainly not going to use every single feature that the engines out there use. Bespoke engines (that are actually used in games) aren't trying to replace Unreal or Unity, they are only providing what the games they are used for need - anything else is unnecessary. Even in the high end AAA space, most bespoke engines do not provide everything that Unreal does - they focus only on the specifics their development teams need.

This is especially important to keep in mind when it comes to smaller (be it indie or "AA") developers - the developers who write their own engines aren't trying to replace Unreal, these engines only support a tiny tiny fraction of the functionality that Unreal does and that is fine because that functionality is what these developers need. If anything, for a smaller developer that does not have the necessary developer manpower to mold an existing gargantuan engine like Unreal to their needs it can be a better choice to go with their own engine than try to understand and modify Unreal.

[codesushi42]

Spoken like a true armchair game developer.

Writing your own engine is never your most important problem as an indie developer nowadays. It's not important at all.

If you have lost sight of that, then you've already failed.

[Crinus]

I never claimed that writing your own engine is the most important problem an indie developer would have. If there is a "most important problem" that would be getting exposure for your game when gamers are drowned by multimillion-funded advertisements for multimillion-funded games (and more often than not, negative news about those multimillion-funded games - visit a gaming forum like /r/games or similar and you will see a lot of posts, videos and comments of how bad games are nowadays, how developers are screwing everyone, etc while everyone making those ignores all the smaller developers who are not doing that, mainly because they are simply invisible to most people).

My comment was about responses that compare custom engines with middleware engines-as-products like Unreal and Unity that imply that a custom engine has to provide at least as much as unreal and unity which is certainly not the case.

And my comment wasn't even about indies, this is the case with non-indie studios too - even AAA ones. In fact the previous AAA game i worked at used a custom engine that had zero networking support (outside of some debugging stuff) - because the games that the studio built were single player titles and thus they didn't need such a feature. This is something that an engine-as-a-product like Unreal or Unity cannot do, they have to care about multi player support even if many of the games they'll be used for are single player only, because some of their customers will also need to create multi player games.