I saw this picture and wanted to share it:
Seems about right.
Except alpha has a different meaning in programming circles. I was slightly puzzled until I saw the picture.
I do agree. At least in the indie space Unity has been the dominant engine for years. Now there are a ton of other engines moving into that space.
For developers it’s been pretty good. We saw significant price wars over the last year, finally ending with every engine being free. (At least I assume they are over, the only way to go from here is to pay us to use the engine).
Unity is definitely a contender for the alpha position if they do not already hold it. About the only other engine that stands a chance at the position is Unreal and only for situations where you do not care about supporting legacy hardware.
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For dev teams of 3-5 people or less, I’d say yes. Any more than that, there may be trouble. It actually surprises me as to how far Amplitude has taken Unity development, because I couldn’t imagine how it was possible.
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I don’t know how I feel about that picture after sinking 30 hours into Ark : Survival Evolved. I want to see something like “unreal paris tour”. I know graphics aren’t the only part of gaming, but damn, the UE4 showcases are shiny.
http://www.benoitdereau.com/images/unrealparis/unrealparis01.jpg
http://www.benoitdereau.com/images/unrealparis/unrealparis02.jpg
So pretty. So pointless gameplay wise, but so pretty.
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And raptors eat humans.
Yet… Unity manages to be a little smarter, and maintains that little edge.
Unity’s market share is being eroded. Regardless of what you think about the quality of engines, the choice means a lot of people are stepping into Unreal first. Schools are teaching both now.
Such is the struggle within the raptor pack.
The college I just graduated from is planning some Unreal courses. They have like 10 unity courses already. I look forward to the future. I hope unity steps it up when Weyl fermion technology is affordable. Unreal has the leg up right now for that day being one of the most hardware demanding engines.
They’ll probably keep that edge because of the asset store & how easy it is to use UNET. Multiplayer was 100% unreal for me until UNET. It’s still easier in unreal, but at least the gap is a little closer.
Personally I would like to see courses stick to using multiple engines even if one suddenly were to become a big leader over the others. We already teach people multiple programming languages with the idea of getting them comfortable with using more than one. We should be doing the same thing with engines. It isn’t like they won’t have to pick up others.
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I’d love to see a universal language and engine. But since the industry can’t even settle on a universal operating system we should just follow @Ryiah 's advice and become engine agnostic. Especially in education, you never know which way the industry will move. And picking the path of an individual student would be even harder.
To me, Unity and Unreal, even GameMaker are a big step toward that universal language and engine idea. It used to be really bad if you were just one person trying to do it on your own. Like, really, really bad before Unity, XNA and all of these other great things came along. Like, writing your own code to pull bitmap image data from files, then pushing bitmap data into buffers and then swapping buffers to achieve a non-flickering 2D image on the screen.
Really the differences between learning one set of tools or another set of tools to do something, and they both make your life a whole lot easier than trying to not use those tools, it’s not all that bad. Also, there will always be at least two competitors in any significant market. If that’s Unity vs. Unreal for the foreseeable future that sounds great.
One language and one engine might actually be a bad thing, also. There’s no checking, no competitiveness to keep things fresh.
Which is the engine with the G logo in the right?
I think that Unity’s sense of democracy has kept things fresh.
Look at all the cool stuff out of the asset store.
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Game Maker
The “G” is the surprisingly still relevant brainchild of Mark Overmars, which in January 26, 2007 underwent a massive change under YoYo Games, which introduced a live web player and went on to actually have real titles produced in it. Hotline Miami was made in GameMaker. The original game that Super Meat Boy was inspired by was called Jumper, it was made in GameMaker. There were lots of other cool games and new games are being made today. Possibly tomorrow’s next big thing. It’s a lot easier to use than Unity, but you can’t get away with the same visual effects and it’s really hard to make games that involve data, due to the extremely limited nature of GM Script, which is basically a sort-of-kind-of JavaScript… unless they’ve improved that as well. It still blows my mind how much that engine improved over the years, though.
People used to laugh at you if you said you used GameMaker.
This is 100% spot on.
I used to tool around with GM, but I also was a doubter that a game could make it big that was made with it.
Way to go HLM! That game is rad.
Unity used to be the leader. But Epic really stepped up their game when they release UE4 for free and reduced the royalty cut to 5%. I definitely think they had a part to play in forcing Unity to release the full engine for free.
Unity have already lost the AAA space to Unreal, if both engines carry on their current trajectory I don’t see Unity lasting beyond another 5 years. Unreal is open source now and are releasing major updates almost every month and have a rapidly growing user base. If we could see a graph of Unity’s user figures I imagine it would look like a slow erosion at the moment. Pro doesn’t really offer any serious benefits to most users so my guess is they’re relying on asset store revenue to keep the company afloat. Unfortunately, as user numbers dwindle, asset store sales will too.
I’ve used Unity since 2012 and released 2 commercial games with it. It has been a great engine, and still is, but as someone wanting to produce AAA quality games for PC/Mac/Linux, Unreal offers much better features. One of my friends who was a long time Unity user had to switch to Unreal about 3 months ago for a new job, and he has been singing its praises since.
A few times I’ve seen scenes which literally make me say “f*ck me that’s gorgeous!” out loud - and each time it has been made with Unreal. Even The Blacksmith demo didn’t have the same impact on me, despite it being showcasing the best of Unity and having a number of graphical improvements not included in the standard software.
After seeing Unity’s disappointing roadmap, I’ll be making the switch this summer.
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And now it would look terrible for either of them to revoke it.
Hard to disagree with some of the names using unreal. Even Hearthstone doesn’t show off much graphically.
It’s fascinating to me that such a well known and capable brand would actually put effort in to stay on top. The team on diablo 3 should take a [expletive] note. And the greedy mo’s who handle the servers. The poor game design drove me away before the server trouble and poor optimization in certain zones, and now there’s rampant botting and hacking problems.
Is that because your friend loves C++ or because he finds blueprints actually useful? I heard that Ark is using a lot of blueprints and it seems to run well (after all of the optimization patches).
Have you seen the video from the 2 images I linked in a previous post? haha
Again I’ll reference the unreal paris tour. In comparison, I have been yet to be impressed by anything else.
Haven’t looked yet. My new job is interested in unity and I don’t have many unreal skills so I may just keep my head in the sand for a while. They want to release low hardware requirement mobile games so… we’ll probably stick to unity.
It will be interesting to see any way. I think unity is winning the indie space as much as unreal is winning AAA. Both engines might be able to differentiate themselves enough to exist.
But if they both go after the same exact market there will be casualties.