Currently I am using both Unity and the new Unreal engine, which I purchased because the great price of 19$ per month. But, I want to tell some users some information in case they are curious. First, those who think that Unity 3d is hard, know that pretty much all the other engines that can do quality as good as Unity are much more difficult. For example, right now I am studying using Unreal’s blueprint part of its engine, and it still much more difficult than Unity. So basically appreciate what you have in Unity 3d, as in my opinion it is far more easier than Unreal to get started. The price is the only part that hurts with unity 3d. The other thing is the community support. I sometimes post questions here and also see others posts, where nobody answers the questions, and this bothers me quite a bit. The forums for the Unreal engine are great, I always had my question answered, and almost always within a few hours. So in sum, Unity 3d is much easier to use, but costs a lot more if you are using it like a casual user like me, who may or may not publish anything. Unreal has a great price model, but is much harder to use, but has better community support. I hope this information answers any person’s question, or if it is obvious information, than I apologize for wasting your time. Thanks!
Indeed, $0.00 is obviously way too expensive. 
–Eric
I was referring to the pro version, obviously.
A casual user who may or may not publish anything is precisely the market for the free Unity license, however.
–Eric
19$/month + 5% royalty is kinda expensive when you put the time to do the math too.
1500$ is nothing for a software of that magnitude.
As Eric said, you don’t need a pro version if you’re going casual. For 0$, you have anything you need to make your dream game alive (more like a pseudo-prototype that you’ll drop after 2 weeks, but still)
In some cases you do need Pro to achieve what you want to design, my game simply couldn’t run without Pro features, but in most instances the FREE version of Unity offered by Unity Technologies will get you very far. I still think the 30 day trial for Pro is counter-productive for developers, but if you can get by using Unity Free, then you can still make a very good product.
I personally prefer the before publishing route that Unreal Engine offers in terms of having everything availible when developing, the 5% is also very reasonable compared to what most will ever see in return when doing a multi person project using Unity Pro(especially the 1500$ per seat mobile add ons).
In terms of development difficulty, just go with whatever is the best for you to work with, worry less about the actual financial costs if they don’t hinder the product you are developing. Unity is a great tool that severly lacks core feature implementations like timeline based event scripting and easy shader/material creation without purchasing assets (uSequencer and Shader Forge does make up for this).
Unreal Engine employs the easiest and hardest coding features of these two engines as they have the great visual scripting system Blueprint in place and allow for manipulating the program core through C++, while Unity has a great C#/bastardized Javascript implementation that allows for a very fast itteration process.
In the end, these are two VERY good products that each fit different needs at very good prices(i may knock Unity’s current pricing model, but the license is very affordable if you need it), test both and make up your own mind to what you prefer to work with most.
I’d rather pay $19/month for a Pro featured solution instead of using the Free version. The Free version is fine for some things, but even us hobbyists need Pro features.
Just think about that sentence for a minute…
Yes, you have to compare it to the proversion, because when you pay the 19$/month with Unreal, you get all the features, and all the platforms. And those features include things only found in the paid version of unity. And then multiply the costs of every platform you support on unity and it gets real expensive. So unreal’s 19$ covers the pro features that would be found in unity AND all the export formats like ios devices, consoles, etc. So thats why it would only be fair to compare to Unity’s pro version.
Don’t you think that’s a bit of a weird thing to say? There are absolutely core functionality locked by the Pro paywall that can severely impact what a hobbyist can effectively make, especially with things hugely popular amongst hobbyists like the Oculus Rift being completely unsupported by Unity Free.
Unless you actually intend to make money off of a pro feature, chances are you really don’t need it. I kind of think UT set a good dividing line making pro features that you really shouldn’t need until you’re serious.
I think both engines are awesome. The fact the Unreal is so cheap is 1000% because of Unity. Unreal knows that within the next 5 years most people are going to be familiar with Unity and is basically going to make Unreal obsolete. Now with the price of Unreal being as cheap as it is, Unity needs to pivot their pricing model($75 a month is a bit to much imo).
As far as community goes Unreal is new and since it is new most of the senior level people are posting on their forms to make sure newer people get their questions answered. If you look online most of the answers for Unity date back to 2011 when Unity 3 was out. They knew the only way to keep people using their product was to answer the forms quick and with what a user wanted, now they allow almost just the community to help, but since the community is so big now a lot of questions go unanswered because of the sheer volume.
That statement might have made some sense prior to the UE4 announcement in March. The current “dividing line” between Free and Pro just sends hobbyists to UE4 in droves.
I spent since its release time evaluating Unreal to see If I plan on using it in the future. And then I realized… Hey my last 3 years using Unity really have made a big difference! I’ll have to spend another 3 years to be just as proficient with Unreal.
There were a few deal breakers for me right off the bat. It’s so new that many features are not implemented yet.
Blender support is just… Static meshes import ok but anything else… It’s my main work tool and If I have to jump through hoops just to import a custom rig… Is it possible to use Blender with Unreal? yes. But with extra work. We’ll see if they focus on this in the future. I know I won’t be the one to troubleshoot it for them.
Blueprints and the shader/material editor are really it’s strongest points. They are insane tools pre-built into Unreal. Does Unity have similar? Yes. For a price. Unity caters to different needs in different ways.
On the other side the new Unity GUI in 4.6 is just to awesome for me. I can’t resist it. Every time I see the video for the new GUI I get all giddy.
Most hobbyists can’t afford Unity PRO so I can understand why many who want top-of-the-line graphics for cheap would rather use Unreal. What bothers me is the constant : Unity! why don’t you do like Epic and charge $20 a month with 5% royalty!! UNITY!! UUUUNNNIITYYY!!!
If Unity ever offers a better monthly plan to devs, well good for those who were patient, but there’s NO WAY I want this instead of my current deal ( I pay perpetual aka full $1500 license deal with a great discount on next version ). Royalties are a headache I don’t need and can afford to not have with UT’s current offerings. Again, you want Unreal’s deal so Badly!? Use Unreal.
For the community; @DexRobinson said it perfect:
Another good point by @GMM :
They are both different in their own way and both can cater to your needs in different ways. They are both amazing engines.
Unreal’s a great engine and blueprints are really great too. All in all I like both engines. But they are different. They are very different to use. And again they cater to different needs. Obviously I’m already back here after even a short evaluation. For my needs Unity is better.
They shouldn’t service us the same ways because then one will become irrelevant. Competition is good. All this did is let us the developers win for once since we now have choice. This will limit stagnation forcing both companies to innovate. This will benefit all three sides: The devs, UT and Epic.
You rang?
Discussing the price has been done I think so lets stick with difficulty… in my case I do find that Unity is a lot easier an API to swallow than UE4’s. And any missing features, well for me, someone who knows Unity, I can cobble together absolutely anything I want. I have endless level editors here, I can organically grow with next to zero compile times. I like that, makes using Unity easier for me personally.
Agreed @hippocoder , It just keeps going and going and going and going…
Unity compiles shaders so quickly especially since 4.5. I was able to import all of Lux shaders in one go in around a min.
So let me make this clear. People buy Unreal Engine due to its sheer brute power and it’s amazing workflow. But it is extremely difficult to understand and getting into its workings is, admittedly, quite a pain. Whenever people choose UE4, you know that they plan on making it big and brining the real bucks. Unity on the other hand offers a free version which is just as proficient as the pro but still lacks some key features. From the point of view of an indie solo game developer, UE4’s pricing might be a dream come true. But let’s do the math shall we?
Let’s say a solo developer created an amazing game on the UDK (after spilling a lot of blood, sweat and tears) and another indie developer has created a high quality game with the Unity engine( with much less difficulty, of course). Now of both the games earn over $100,000 and the Dev using Unity engine will have to purchase the 3 licenses and they will approximately cost $4800(Inclusive of taxes) and he doesn’t have to pay anything more. He can now keep the rest of his earnings to himself and live a wonderful, happy life.
Whereas the dev using the UE has to continuously pay 5% in the form of royalties. This means he has to pay $5000 for every 100,000 he earns. This means he ends up paying quite a hefty amount to Epic. He even has to pay 5% royalties on funds that he may have received from, say, Indiegogo or kickstarter.
So in the long run, Unity stands out as the clear winner for “Indie” developers who may be pursuing it as a hobby or are planning on going full time.
Just my 2 cents. 
The discussion about UE4 forums piqued my interest
Legacy :
As for some background, I have worked with Unreal 3 source for many years. Most developers on UDN (Unreal Developer Network) were/ are used to working with raw source and very little “currently relevant” documentation from Epic. You infer what code does by reading it not some indepth documents. Developers (studios) used to pay a huge sum - hundred of thousands of dollars for a source code license for Unreal 3 . Epic provided support - but the best support came from UDN . The culture for “crowd - bug fixing” evolved. Code drops from Unreal’s perforce servers were merged to developer’s code branches and the merge / fix/ test cycle ensued. The quickest way to get past common issues was to check with the forum - Epic used to take code fixes from the community to their main line at times. Unreal 4 caries on this legacy further. Hence you may find the response times are faster there. It is the culture.
Ease:
Unreal was never “easy”! The barrier of entry for Unreal was a lot more. Training fresh people was a pain cause of the time they took to be production ready was months. Unity changed all that! I could help train a fresh team in a couple of weeks!! The best part of Unity is the ease of use of the tools. Also Unity3D is way more forgiving . Do not forget the scripting side of things ! The biggest time saver is Mono and C# combination - the people in Unity Tech need to be commended for their foresight. Anyone who has worked with UE3 and done the UnrealScript change ->C++ Header generation ->C++ compile- > Build → launch cycle knows the pain.If you were developing a multi-player title and you made some replication changes etc - you needed even more time to set up the server(s) and clients for test. Typically for my project it took atleast 7-10 minutes to start testing code changes in-game if not more. And I do not have enough bile to loath Unrealscript but lets just say Unity & Mono VM is way more workable. That being said - Unreal 3 with its source code access was way more powerful - especially when it came to change things on the rendering or System side of things. Eg: For a long time Unity3D shipped WWW without HTTP Response header support .I had to roll my own version of WWW as plugin to get Restful services working in Unity. I had no way of adding header retrieval support to WWW :(.
Please note , however, that in UE4 C++ workflow is still disruptive. For new units of code you’ll need to restart the engine. Eg: If you introduce a new Actor class , UE4 Editor will need to be rebooted for it to recognise it and use it in-editor. Unlike in Unity3D where a unit of code ( monobehaviour) can be attached as soon as it can be compiled within the editor. This compositional workflow is beautiful! Unreal has components too - but they aren’t the same thing. The workflow is not as iteration friendly. The basic difference of code and script.
Price point:
The revenue model from Epic is aggressive to compete with Unity’s meteoric rise in the last 3-4 years, This has everything to do with the democratization of engine availability that Unity3D Free provides.Coupled with the rise of the Indie developer and shrinking concept of “burn rate”. UDK- introduced years ago to cater the needs of hobbyists and Indie developers was never really a great competitor for Unity like engines .For a couple of reasons - the major being the constraints from Epic (no access to C++ source) . UDK users had to work with UnrealScript with all it’s laughable debugging options. UDK Editor Tools were still not as easy to work with as Unity3D. Epic hopes to change that in Unreal4. Things are a lot more shinier. A new build tool chain, new editor, visual scripting (with debug support - mind) . Unreal 4 brings source code to the masses - at its $20(per seat) +5% gross cut- cutting into the business. Is it right for you - you’ll need to do the financial planning yourself. 5% of $0 is still $0 .
“5% of $0 is still $0” is very relevant because most people who use Unity will not publish or make money off of it. I am pretty much just a hobbyist and use Unity for my own pleasure, so its easier for me to pay 19 per month versus 75. But Unreal is just so much harder that I have to go for the 75 whether I like it or not. I would love if Unity came out with a pro-feature version that you could not publish with and charged less for it. I think that would get Unity alot more revenue and business.