So Unity is not the only one…
Unity was not the only one already before that. Stonetrip (-> Shiva) has had it in the pipe for a while too.
Question is how many are really going to use it on which one. UDK licensing makes it even less interesting for social games than it already is on standalone as social games with their Freemium model already are paying a lot for different things and handing over 25% of that not always large amount of cash directly to epic is pretty hurting
That being said: Nobody said its coming to UDK anytime soon, so that point might actually be of no importance in the end if UDK simply does not get it which might be very well the case
Not new, what is provably new is Unreal Engine enabling shadowmapping for A5 iOS devices. Which is what unity should do with v3.5!
Hopefully unity ninjas will allow shadowmapping on Unity mobile soon. 
UDK has the edge there cause no nooby will use UDK and thus no nooby will blame udk for user incapability on reading that you should not enable shadow on anyhting but ipad2 and iphone 4s 
No combat?
Yeh, forgot to mention that it was on A5 iDevices only. I’m gonna update my post.^^
I think Unreal and Unity are, even if they support more and more of the same deploy platforms options still tailored for quite different user groups.
Unreal is out of the box more focussed on creating FPS games in certain look for it whereas unity is not focussed on creating fps games out of the box but instead comes with art and editor features out of the box which make it more a general purpose engine good for all sorts of games in all sorts of looks out of the box imho.
Sure with enough effort one can make any game type in any genre and art style in both of em but still, yeah, that´s what my feeling is for what they are focussed on out of the box.
Then next up the licensing options also make it attractive to different kinds of people.
If you’re just someone making stuff for fun without any intend or need for earning money with it one could either pick unity indy or udk.
But as soon as one wants to or has to earn money with the games one makes, then one has to consider more carefully whether one would prefer to pay a one time license per deploy platform fee with unity or get udk for free initially but then in return pay Epic quite some ongoing money from revenue shares if the game makes enough money.
Me personally i always liked the workflow and coding languages supported in unity a lot (and more than in unreal) but what i liked most about unity was the work attitude, characters and personalities and mantra of the Unity team.
Now that may sound like esoteric hippy flippy mumbo jumbo, but no, that was something very real, tangible and important setting Unity miles apart from any of the bigger middleware providers out there for a good while.
I have sadly never met David Helgason and some others from the unity core team yet (though i met some others at GDC etc so hello again fellas, was very glad to get to know such cool, fun and brilliant guys =) ), but yes, it had a serious impact on our decission to use unity more, seeing that after visiting the forums for a while back then many of the core UT tech, engineer and lead fellas were constantly active and supportive in the forums instead of only touting marketing shit at conferences and press releases like its the case with many other companies.
I got the deserved feel that the community at large was listened to, their sensmaking requests put into effect and all treated equally without looking down at people.
Then when saying democratizing game development at conferences it was no marketing shit, it was very real and tangible in the way they did things every day.
That also got me more excited about unity to the degree where i would even like to be a part of the team.
Sadly, as unity grows i see a trend on those ends towards the direction many companies take as they grow bigger .
As one can see from the unite keynote videos the core team are still those great guys,
but yeah, as the product and community grows there´s of course not much time or possibility anymore that all the core people from back then post as much as they used to in the forums.
I also totally understand that and its a good thing in a way because it means they are pushing on getting the engine forward =)
What i dislike though is marketing side and the reachability side and the democratizing side taking a step back or towards a different direction.
I feel like its more difficult for many smaller guys to get in touch with the positions in the know or decision positions on many topics now and get productive things going (like for example i have no idea whom i could contact now to get some proper talk going on onlive sdk integration for example or many other topics) and regarding the democratization side well, now its at the stage where many features are shown many months in advance and then also for many months only very few teams get access to them even many months before maybe even beta testers get access to it.
I feel like this isn’t an ideal approach to take at all,
both regarding the customers/democratization concept, but also regarding the progress of the engine (because the few select groups even if they push the engine a lot on some fronts maybe don´t have exactly or all the same needs which the majority of the other users have) and also regarding compeition, cause when hyping up things very long timespans before rolling them out to most users even just in beta form, well, that kinda way also means all the compeition middleware makers probably get rolling on making similar stuff before most of your users have access to any of the features you work on.
Me for example i wonder if Epic would have shown Unreal deploying to flash player at allor as soon as it happened now if UT hadn´t shown that so long ago before rolling it out to the users.
Don’t get me wrong, i LOVE hearing what else you fellas have in the pipe for us for the future, but yeah, its a bummer when the majority of users don’t get access to such things even just in beta form for a very long timespan then.
Me personally i’d way prefer it if beta access was given to more people and/or beta access was also given in earlier stages where people also have more impact value on what gets added or not or when and could suggst more things other than just via the feedback site and well, some things could also be rolled out in beta form via the asset store or in several other way i could think of, just like one could think of improving the beta and democratization workflow in general.
Anyway, yeah, i got ranty, my two cents for now, hope i didn´t rub too many the wrong way and haven’t attracted too much anger from the few UT fellas who know me and hopefully liked me just a tad at least, it was all meant positive and constructive =)
Last year the UE got on the Iphone/Android, now they get on the browser with flash. Competitionin the engine markt is really good in my opinion, I’m not shure if there would have been a UDK without Unity Free.
Both engines have their strength, UDK has more AAA tools and shaders already build in and Unity gives you more freedom and more control as well as more compatibility towards low end. Funny thing that both engines are weak when it comes to network technology. 
However, its good to see that they both try to push boundaries in their individual ways, Im quite curious how webgames will develope in the future. Personally I think that games will get more and more an integrated experience with other media. Maybe sometime people identify themself with games like a lot already do with their gadgets like the Iphone.
UE != UDK just for those putting it into the same bowl and mixing it up.
Unless it comes to UDK, I don’t even see a releationship or competition to Unity in it as a multi 10k license per title to even get the technology is quite a bit different to $1500 flat + whatever flash targeting will cost on top of it for unlimited numbers of titles.
And when it comes to UDK its no better, cause creating a social game where flash really would make sense costs money in a range where the 25% will burn your ass that badly that it can not even try to stand up against Unity
UDK is Unreal Engine. It’s just a binary version of the engine.
Agree, UDK is UE3, it is not if you want to complicate, but well summed up version would be: its is UE 3.5 binary version with 20% royaltie cut.
That is correct but only theoretically.
Epic removed a plentitude of things from UE for UDK (its an own branch I would assume that shares the core but not the higher end), until recently you were running on DX9, when was the last time UE was running purely on DX9 at max?
There is no reason that it should hit UDK directly or at all, look back at iOS for a comparision. And for iOS there was more reason to move it to UDK, as I doubt there was much interest to license it at UEs license scheme and price with Unity around.
For flash the main reason for UDK is that the share milks much better than a flat fee due to the explosive growth of social games which on the other hand is also directly the reason it wouldn’t make any sense. With the major limitations you will potentially have on networking it might not be capable of social mmo scale games at all without licensing UE, as it is already the case for MO titles with UDK
So out of my view: we will see what will happen and where, same as for Flash in unity where no guarantee is that it will be running under the current licensing or anything alike with the clear fact that it will be used for social games where a share a la union would be 10 times better for UT
I dont really understand why they even need flash support because really, those playing flash games usually cannot handle such resource intensive games that UDK delivers…it makes no sense why they wouldn’t just have a downloadable title for AAA games…
The reason to add a flash export option is to circumvent people that don’t want to download more plugins. A lot of people think of viruses, and some people will avoid playing a game if it uses a new plugin. Flash, despite also being a plugin itself has a much higher market penetration, and people will think it’s an embedded part of the browser itself. I find this kinda funny because Flash itself has been notoriously riddled with security loopholes. It’s merely an upgrade of consumer perception. With Molehill (or Air 3 or Flash 11 or whatever you wanna call it) Flash now has proper GPU graphics APIs, and so it can start to perform at the level of other plugins now.
From a technical standpoint it’s ludicrous, taking your own custom plugin, and discarding it so you can run with more overhead on a less secure plugin. However from a business standpoint it avoids ignorant predispositions against plugins that are not Flash, and so can increase your potential user base.