[the_duke]

Not my field of work, but I'm curious.

From what I'm hearing Unreal is establishing a big lead over the competition with things like Lumen, face model generation (Metahuman?), asset libraries, ML assisted images/video to model converters, very polished editor tooling ,world builders, ...

All things that take a lot of money to make.

Is there any chance to compete in the near or medium term for things like Unity or Godot? Outside of small indie studios or hobbyists that is.

[_hao]

Unreal is ahead for a couple of reasons (mainly historical + money) and they target industries outside of games as well now - namely film productions.

With that said most big AAA companies still use their proprietary game engines and I don't see that changing. General purpose engines like Unreal/Unity/Godot have their place of course, but to use the full set of features of Unreal you need a big team anyways, so comparing it to Unity and Godot doesn't seem right to me at least. Godot is slowly eating Unity's lunch though. Especially given the direction that Unity has taken after their IPO they might be in trouble in the near future.

Also there are some crazy people (like me) that just write their own engines for the projects they are doing and here's hoping that in time our number will actually grow. It would be very sad if the game engine world ends up like the OS or browser world for example.

[arocketman]

I am not sure about the "I don't see that changing". CD projekt red has adopted unreal engine leaving behind the engine they built AAA games such as The Witcher 3. I can see a future where more gaming houses adopt the engine as well.

[_hao]

There are good arguments from both sides of the fence in the “generic solution” VS “custom solution” debate. I think the decision should be made on a case by case basis after sufficient analysis has been conducted. For example, I wouldn’t do an RTS/Total War type game in either of the 3 aforementioned engines. Also it should be noted that sign of the times is that we’ll be getting less AAA games, not more. It’s clear that those huge budget games carry substantial risk if not successful (hence early incremental updates, DLC, mico-transactions etc.) and studios are weary of that.

For CD Project the move to Unreal might make sense just from labour market perspective - it’s easier to hire programmers for Unreal than to train programmers to learn and develop your own in-house engine. Larger community and support already exists for Unreal etc. That move will affect their bottom line on their next games though. 5% is nothing to scoff at for a big product from a big company.

In any case, I’d advise caution to companies relying entirely on a single platform for their business. To echo my previous statement choosing only between Android and iOS for mobile is an illusion of choice. If you’re a mobile game dev your entire business relies on two relatively hostile companies.

[klodolph]

Crazy people writing their own engines—growing in absolute numbers, shrinking in relative numbers.

[jayd16]

This is kind of like looking at a race car and wondering how anything else can compete. First off, Unity and Godot have different license models from Unreal. There's room just based on that. Moreover, a lot of the fancy new stuff doesn't run well or at all on mobile, a huge segment of the market. I'm not saying Unity or Godot have it easy but there's still a lot of room in the market.

[djmips]

The race car analogy can be extended in that UE4 doesn't even give you a competitive F1 car but it's marketed as such. AAA companies outside of Epic using UE4 have spent a kings ransom on customizations to tailor it for console. Much like top F1 teams just getting an engine doesn't put you out front without a bunch more work. Nevertheless, this is only a problem if you think you can take UE4 and a small team and make a AAA game that's pushing lots of polys on older consoles at high fps without extra work.

[danbolt]

I'm a little surprised you're being downvoted. There might be a bit of hyperbole in your words, but no game engine is entirely off-the-shelf per-game. Or, idiomatic code suited to an engine always requires a bit of elbow grease to be ready for shipping.

[djmips]

I'm being downvoted, likely, by people with little experience in this particular area I guess... There is a real actual gulf between a fully tuned AAA game engine and what you can buy.

[malikNF]

>This is kind of like looking at a race car and wondering how anything else can compete

Sorry I have nothing else to add to your comment, but I just wanted to say I love your analogy. I am stealing this one.

[naet]

Unity is still extremely popular. The Unreal vs Unity engine debate has raged with plenty of people on both sides for years now all over game dev forums.

I don't have any exact stats offhand, but I believe there are plenty of big games recently published that were developed on Unity. The only examples I remember rn are Fortnite (Unreal, but sort of doesn't count because it's made by Epic Games, the makers of the engine...) and Fall Guys (Unity).

Unreal may have an edge on certain areas, and might have a slight edge with AAA level game producers that haven't built their own engine... but Unity has a possible edge in ease of use, a very popular asset store ecosystem, etc that make it arguably better for certain projects. See above examples, Fortnite and Fall Guys both chose their engines appropriate to their teams and project sizes.

Godot is for sure more indie, but has a pretty good trend upwards. Unity had some bad press recently after the merge / acquisition that may push a percentage of their market share towards Godot.

[BoorishBears]

As someone who's been following that debate since the Unity 2.x days, I'd say Unreal might start to pick up steam once "Verse" drops

That's their purported scripting language for Unreal. By far the most "serious hobbyist" unfriendly aspect of Unreal has always been the heavy macro based C++. They tend to be people who don't like the idea of visual programming, so hate Blueprints (no hat in this race, I think they're ok), and have come from the cushy tooling you get with C# like Rider

Verse has a good chance to give Unreal a fresh start with some tight focused tooling and good ergonomics.

It's also a little ironic to say that since that's the opposite story of Unity, which dropped Boo and "Unityscript" to great effect... but that's how daunting C++ is for some people

[foldr]

IIRC the early versions of the Unreal engine used another custom scripting language, UnrealScript. It's interesting how engine developers go back and forth on the costs/benefits of embedded scripting languages. I think something similar happened with the Quake engine too (Quake 1 had QuakeC, whereas Quake 2 onwards was C/C++ all the way down).

[spywaregorilla]

Unreal has titles like Borderlands, Street fighter, Kingdom Hearts, and XCOM

List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

[lux]

I would assume Unity has something in the works internally, but it looks like someone is creating a Nanite/Lumen equivalent for Unity here:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-unity-improver-nano-t...

As for Metahumans, Unity has started on an equivalent of that too:

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/tutorial-pr...

Character Creator is also looking like they're stepping up their game to match Metahumans:

https://www.reallusion.com/character-creator/default.html

That said, I'd love to see these things come to Godot specifically, including performance on the level of Unity ECS/DOTS.

[jsf01]

Not my field of work either but my understanding is that Unity, as a public company, should have no trouble competing with Unreal where cost is the limiting factor. They’ve got plenty of resources. Godot on the other hand has a totally different audience. So while they have far fewer resources/staff to throw at their product, they don’t need to try to achieve feature parity with Unity and Unreal. Part of why hobbyists and small studios enjoy working in Godot is its simplicity.

[netr0ute]

> All things that take a lot of money to make.

Untrue, as shown by numerous FOSS projects run by volunteers.

[qznc]

I’d say Godot is the best FOSS can offer and it is clearly behind Unreal. This, True.

[fezfight]

Blender (and Linux) is possibly the best thing FOSS can offer.