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by naet 1417 days ago
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.

2 comments

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

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

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