[keerthiko]

My teammate and I started moonlighting on the first game for our studio about 8 months ago, right before Epic announced the current $19.95/seat pricing model. We decided to go with Unity purely because I already owned a Pro license, that we could use to make final beta builds and be responsible for the advanced visual effects that needed Pro. Additionally I already had lots of experience with Unity, and nearly none with UE.

We are only a two-person team, making a fairly limited-scope 3D puzzle racer game. Thus we didn't hit the major issues with collaboration bugs (we did a few times) or platform switching (we're focusing only on PC). We were able to build our MVP in less than 2 weeks of hacking, and it felt amazing. The asset store was also an amazing resource to circumvent the artist issues.

However, it's been nearly a year since then, and polishing the game to the standards we'd like has been presenting larger and larger challenges -- performance, obscure shader behaviour, limited editor extensibility (it's good, but not quite good enough), and reading this post, it looks like at this stage of development Unreal would have served us much much better.

If we can get our studio rolling and increase our team size to actually incorporate dedicated artists, we'll have to seriously consider switching to UE4 for our next game.

Jeff's write-up sheds insight that few people can have, given not everyone has spent the time to get well-enough acquainted with both engines in the team setting to know their professional tradeoffs as well, and I appreciate it a lot.

[christoph]

You highlight one of Unity's real strengths here that is often forgotten - the asset store. Want to drop in a nice city scene? Thats 10 bucks. Want realistic car physics? That's 10 bucks. A few nice NPC's with rigged faces? Thats 20 bucks. A pack of nice shaders? 10 bucks.

I don't think Unity is targeting AAA developers at all. Its targeting small studios that want to get ideas built quickly. It's got great, simple Oculus integration as well. If you're planning on building something AAA (or close), you probably have modellers, artists and level designers and don't need the asset store. You probably need, or are already using Unreal.

[ivanca]

Absolutely false, using imported materials and creating your own is extremely easy to do in Unreal, and there are tons online of stores where you can buy 3D models, Unreal integrates pretty well with all kinds of 3D models (including riggs) specially those from Autodesk Maya. And over top of that there is an Asset Store for Unreal, is called the Marketplace and the EPIC team is filling it itself with tons of free high quality materials and models.

[endergen]

Agreed, the amount of sites and places on thr internet devs/designers can find sounds, textures, 3D assets, images, vector, and etc far surpasd the value provided by the Asset Store. And the open source code and paid third-party lib ecosysyem outside of Unity's purview is much more rich.

[exDM69]

Yes but the point in OP and GP is that the amount of content available in the Unity store is greater than other stores. Sure Unreal has the same goodness but there just isn't as much stuff readily available in the Store you can just pick up and use.

So it's a content issue, not a technical issue with the engine itself.

[TMichael]

@christoph:

As the article's author pointed out, you don't need many of those addons in UE4 because the functionality is ALREADY built into the engine.

Want realistic car physics? Already built in! Want great shaders? Already built in! Want rigged faces or a cityscape background? As regular assets, buy them anywhere on the internet (including the Unity asset store), and then put them into UE4!

And this is why one of Unity's strengths is also one of its weaknesses. The reliance on so many third party libraries for basic functionality means that A) integration with the engine isn't always perfect, B) updates and fixes are dependent on the third party author, and C) the UT community is nickeled and dimed for many things which should be included already.

[_random_]

Then people publish whiny posts on how tough the mobile game market is and how nobody notices their game (which is a bunch of scripts tying together pre-made components and assets).