I think UE and Unity has complete different markets. Unity is focused on small mobile game developers, those small shops don’t have expertise to work with UE C++ source code and most of them are new grads themselves.
I’m not sure what is the overall strategy of Unity but I don’t believe they care much about the PC/Console space and frankly at this point I don’t believe they will ever manage to capture it from UE.
I thought I remembered there being some bigger games, but looking at a list[1], they are all pretty indie, or at least small. Not sure I saw a AAA game on the list (which doesn't mean there aren't any, but they seem rare). The equivalent list for Unreal Engine[2] does contain quite a few big titles (along with a plethora of less well known ones).
I'm not sure if that's cause, effect or marketing. It could be that using Unreal Engine results in a smoother process and is more likely to result in a AAA target game being AAA. It could be that AAA studios area already predisposed to use Unreal Engine. It could be both. It could be that Unreal Engine is just better at marketing to larger studios given their pedigree.
Unreal is for people who get games financed. The demos looks great and the execs don’t play games anyhow so what do they know. That’s why it’s all FPSes, it’s stuff non-game-playing adults can understand just by looking at it. They will fund the most photoreal looking pitch for the Star Wars IP.
Unreal as an engine product is competing with Frostbite and Source Engine (the various engines Star Wars appeared recently) not Unity.
However EA and Respawn won those bids for a variety o reasons, mostly related to the mechanics of royalties and their support commitments.
It’s complicated. There are many forces at work, only somewhat related to engineering, that funnels the engines to one kind of game or another.
Escape from Tarkov might be the biggest Unity game on Twitch right now. Thanks to Unity you get game stutter and freezes during tense action. Escape from Tarkov devs keep promising every year that thanks to the close cooperation with Unity team 'this next update' is totally going to solve the problem! year after year it doesnt.
Game stutters and freezes during tense action sound like GC related problems. In theory it is solvable but I doubt that anyone is going to bother and actually put in the work. Lots of popular games have known flaws and unless there is a direct competitor nobody is going to switch games.
Hearthstone is the largest that comes to mind, I'm not sure if it qualifies as a AAA game but it's from a large studio with a lot of experience and earns AAA money.
Hardly a complex product compared to some, yes, but time to market and speed of iteration are still important. I don't like the game but the presentation and feel was good when I tried it.
I don't know how well it worked out for them overall though, and I don't recall seeing them use Unity again on another game.
There are a bunch of AAA-ish? RPGs and strategies on Unity, like Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder, Endless Legend, Endless Space. They may not have the player numbers of Heartstone but they are basically what top notch equivalents like like Baldurs Gate or Civ are, and more.
In my experience Pathfinder for example suffers from poor perf compared to e.g. Tyranny, but Endless Legend doesn't compared to recent AoW or whatever non-unity game equivalent.
The OP article is written by Garry Newman the developer that did Rust in the Unity list from 2013. Previously he was the developer of Garry's Mod on Valve Source engine.
I'm not sure what you're trying to communicate. That Rust is a AAA title? It's not, as I understand it. AAA is not a designation of quality or popularity, it's a designation of resources that go into it. Large company with lots of resources putting lots of money behind it means AAA. It's less a designation of the end product than of the process going into that product.
Just mentioned that it was on the list of games in terms of popularity, never said it was AAA.
However, Garry has lots of pull in games including towards AAA developers. I did not say that game was AAA but on the notable Unity list that everyone knows about.
Rust is much bigger than most Unity games, so Garry's opinion on this is highly relevant and influential. Facepunch studios and their forums were also a gamedev spot for a long time.
Garry Newman is also someone speaking from shipping experience in another engine that is for AAA studios, Valve Source Engine. Eventhough that was a mod, and yes not a massive budget or team, it has pull at the AAA level in terms of influence as well.
Rust competes with AAA titles on Steam in terms of playtime/playercount all the time, was top 10 for a while and quite often. [1]
The point is Garry's opinion is more valid than most, even at AAA probably about Unity. A developer of a top 10 Steam game has some pull and is someone to listen to, hopefully Unity hears it. Rust is clearly one of the biggest games in terms of playtime/playercount than most Unity games at least on Steam with the popularity only rising since release in 2013.
Rust is AAA level in terms of playtime/playercount with a small team, that is exactly the market Unity wants, in fact it highlights the benefits of Unity clearly. They should listen.
I think you misinterpreted my original comment (which is why yours seemed like a non-sequitur to me).
I wasn't saying Garry doesn't have any big games, I was saying that the list of games made using Unity doesn't include many big/AAA games. I also wondered why this might be.
To clarify, I'm not saying there aren't AAA Unity games, just that I didn't immediately see one. Nor am I stating that Rust is not as good as a AAA game, I made my position clear that AAA is more to do with resources. I would even go so far as to say it's more of a marketing term. What I am saying is that is seems like (from the lists I saw) a lot more large and AAA titles are made using Unreal Engine, and I wondered what specifically leads to that.
> The point is Garry's opinion is more valid than most, even at AAA probably about Unity.
I'm not sure why that's the point. It has absolutely nothing to do with what I was talking about. This thread was about Unity being better targeted as small/indie/mobile developers, and I was responding in that context.
Ok yeah we were talking past each other initially, I see what you are saying now.
I never really mentioned AAA and the reply I made about Rust was also saying that they said "Not sure I saw a AAA game on the list" which is true in terms of budget/team size but not playtime/playercount for a few games on the list.
The biggest games in Unity are probably Rust and Kerbal Space Program merely in terms of playercount/playtime and they do compete with AAA on those metrics, not team or budget size. Both teams have complaints about Unity, as everything, as long as those are addressed things progress.
That is the problem though, Unity is chasing AAA/more licenses when their main target is mobile/smaller scale games and doing that simply. That is the reason both Rust and Kerbal started using Unity, simplicity.
Garry picked Rust in 2013 for the simplicity as he says
> "Unity was about that when we first started with it. They hid all the hard stuff in c++ so we didn't have to think about it. The more time has gone on, the more bullshit has crept to the forefront. The've gone from hiding the hard stuff to moving more and more stuff into C#."
With Unity Rust is competing at the level of playercount/playtime with AAA. That is literally the thing Unity wants the most and their selling point. Unity you can have smaller developers, able to make games that can compete with less team, with a focus on simplicity and being the engine team that makes transitions easy. It is also ok if they are hard transitions if there are major improvements. Unity is many times asking you to update to a new system that is the same or sometimes less than what you need in terms of benefit, and then only to be half complete and then changed again.
As Garry said
> "So while other engines have been trying to catch Unity up in terms of developer friendliness, Unity has been going the other way by making itself more unfriendly."
They are losing the simplicity selling point.
Unity can make games that compete, they should be taking these critiques to heart strongly as teams/games like Rust and Kerbal are exactly the target they should be going for along with smaller games/mobile games etc.
Unity has so many internal developers now, that requires alot more communication needs, testing needs and maintenance. It also pulls the company in many directions if there is no clear engineering/product lead at the top and it is all management/business/finance pushing feature based development which gets them into version 2 syndrome or the "second-system effect".
> The second-system effect (also known as second-system syndrome) is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems, due to inflated expectations and overconfidence.
If the second-system effect doesn't describe Unity I don't know what does.
Get back to simplicity Unity, let the engineers/product people have power to set this back on course. Stop catering to big developers, they make their own engine for this reason, consistency and simplicity of their own process. Dogfood Unity with an actual game, the problems will be clear today. If you aren't doing that, listen to people like Garry who are.
But it's more fun to work on 5 different rendering pipelines! They're definitely trying to please everyone without really catering greatly to anyone. Like the official 2D capabilities are still about as hacky as what I implemented 5 years ago myself in about a month of work at a mobile games studio.
A lot of mobile game developers who use Unity aren't small at all. They are huge companies with lots of experienced engineers. The baby devs don't generate the $ for Unity.
> A lot of mobile game developers who use Unity aren't small at all. They are huge companies with lots of experienced engineers. The baby devs don't generate the $ for Unity.
Even if they are large companies, the teams are still small and the point of Unity is simplicity.
Unity wants to be AAA for console/desktop but mobile is their bread and butter as you say. Companies and indies chose it for simplicity and there are lots of Unity developers. They are messing up the simplicity angle and going after new markets but causing pain for their existing customers. I get they want to grow and sell more licenses, but I'd argue most of their paying customers are indies, smaller mobile studios and larger mobile studios the have many small game teams.
Unity also make lots of money from the asset store. All these constant breaking changes also break many assets.
Unity just need a more consistent surface level API/signature/facade, and move the hard stuff down below that for most cases with advanced modes accessible with more setup/work. Their changes now are making people that don't need AAA level output, more cartoony mobile games, do unnecessary work losing out on their selling point of simplicity.
Mobile games in some sense have taken over gaming. They're not as flashy, but the amount of money some of them seem to generate is obscene. Just take a look at NCSoft's income and how mobile Lineage crushed all of their other offerings.
I’m not sure what is the overall strategy of Unity but I don’t believe they care much about the PC/Console space and frankly at this point I don’t believe they will ever manage to capture it from UE.