So Unity decided to
basically set itself on fire and a lot of and a lot of developers started
looking for other alternatives. But then Unity was like "No,
please, come back! I can change!" And was able to
put out most of the fire. But the damage was already done. And now that the dust has
settled and that Unity CEO is finally gone, alongside the stupidly
dumb changes they wanted to make, it's time for
me to make a decision. Do I stick with Unity or
do I go to a different engine? If you don't know
who I am, my name is Lixian. I am a full-time
editor and a part-time hobbyist game developer who has
released a handful of games, most of them in Unity, and today I am going to tell
you why I'm choosing the Unreal Engine to start developing
my games instead of Unity. And at the end of
the video there'll be a surprising plot
twist that no one is expecting. Also I know some of you are
probably asking "What about Godot?" And I'll get my
thoughts on Godot later in the video. Number one! It's old. Not like falling apart old,
but more like a fine wine kind of old. What I mean by this is, this
engine is battle-tested and it has shipped an insane amount of games. Its first game was called Unreal, hence the name of
the engine, back in 1998. And it's
currently on its fifth version with even more
features than I could ask for. It's not a
perfect engine, but more than ready to
tackle any sort of game. Except for 2D games,
but we'll get to that later. Number two! So many features! Unreal has a ton of
features out of the box. I'm talking new
robust animation system, AI Behavior Trees,
Water and River System, Cloth Simulation,
Chaos Destruction physics World Partition
and so much more! And let's not
forget the great duo that was introduced in
version 5.0: Lumen and Nanite. I know these have
been talked about to death, but they are two
incredible tools that make my game
dev life so much easier. It's good practice to keep
your models as low poly as possible, but knowing that it can
automatically create LODs for my meshes without me
needing to worry about it, it's so freeing and so much more time effective
for an indie developer. And nothing blows my mind
more than placing a light and having it bouncing in real
time across the level, without having to wait
7000 years for the light to bake. Plus, because Epic Games
are also developing other games... Fortnite, every feature they create for it will also be in the
engine for everyone else to use. This way we, the developers,
get top tier features as they get created, implemented and
tested in their own many, many games. It's just Fortnite. Number 3! It's a GAME engine! Unity is also a game
engine, but Unreal is a GAME engine. Let me explain. Unreal was built from
the ground up to make games. So things like player
character, player controller, game state, AI, all of these systems are
an integral part of the engine. In Unity,
a lot of these systems, if not all of them, have to be done from scratch. Which in a way can
give you more freedom and makes Unity feel
more like a sandbox engine, whereas in Unreal, by
already having all of these game systems implemented, makes
it an actual GAME engine. When I need a new player
character, I just make a new character. And I have a ton
of features to work with. If I need my character to jump, I could program a
jumping mechanic on my own OR or I could
just call the jump function. And we're done! And if I need to
tweak the jumping, all the jumping settings are
on the character component. However, there are
some downsides to this. If you're coming from Unity
like I was, all of this functionality Unreal has can be
a little overwhelming. Why are there so many settings?! It also requires you to work
in a certain way with the engine, and that can take a
bit of time to get used to. Because if you don't do
things in a specific way, or if you're working against the engine,
you're going to have a bad time. Also, I know Unreal
provides tools for other fields such as movies
and architectural visualization, but this engine was
made primarily for games. Number 4 Blueprints!! I love regular
text programming, but there's something so
wonderful about blueprints. Even if sometimes it can
look a little... spaghetti-fied. I've heard that, technically,
you can't do everything in blueprints, but so far I haven't come across
anything that blueprints couldn't handle. And, like I mentioned in
another video, I like colors. So blueprints are a
colorful programming heaven for me. Number 5 So much free stuff For the past few years, Epic
Games has been giving away 5 free assets from their
marketplace every month. And even before I
started using Unreal, I started hoarding
them, because 1 they're free and 2 maybe they
could be useful in the future. And turns out they were! And it's not
like cheap assets either. I mean, the price varies, but
some of these can be very expensive. I'm not sure how long
they'll be doing this, most likely won't be forever, but as long as they keep
providing, I'll keep hoarding. And let's not forget about
Quixel Megascans and MetaHumans, a gigantic
library of 3D models and materials that
technically have a subscription fee, but if you use them in
Unreal Engine, they are 100% free. And MetaHumans is
kinda like a Sims creator, except the
characters are stupid realistic. Number 6 It's owned by Epic Games This whole
Unity thing made a lot of developers question the
trust of game engine providers. Now, could Epic Games do
the exact same thing Unity did? Well, technically, yes, but
here are the two major differences. First, the CEO
of Epic Games is Tim Sweeney the creator of the Unreal Engine. So Mr. Sweeney knows what
it's like to be a game developer, and more
importantly, he knows what it's like to be an
independent game developer. He knows how much work, dedication and effort is
required to build a game. The second one is, Unity
makes money with its engine users, whereas Epic
Games makes money not only licensing their
engine, but also with their games. So they don't solely rely
on the engine to make a profit. You know, because
Fortnite brings in the money bags. Even though
they just fired a bunch of people and
are going to implement a new subscription
fee for non-game developers. Speaking of bad news, here
are the downsides of Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine for
2D games? Kinda sucks. They had this plugin
called Paper2D in Unreal Engine 4, but they decided
to double down on the 3D features and stopped
supporting it completely. However, I know
there's a plugin called PaperZD, but it's a marketplace asset and it's not made by
Epic Games themselves. So that's
something to keep in mind, although it
could work wonderfully. I don't know, I've
never tried it, but I've seen enough people
saying good things about it. And it's free, so you
could always give it a try. Another thing is, Unreal HEAVY! Unreal is a
beast of an engine with, like I
mentioned, a lot of features. That means that
it can become quite bloated it requires a lot of storage space, and it's a
memory-munching monster. You can boot up the engine and
it will start using just a couple of gigabytes of RAM and an hour later, 15. You don't need the most
powerful computer to run it, but you still need a
powerful computer to run it. And then there's C++, which is not really a downside per se, it's just that it's
more complicated than C#. Although I've
heard that for Unreal Engine specifically, it's a bit more streamlined, so not as
complicated as the REAL C++. It's a monster
that I've yet to tackle myself and I will have to in the future, but for now, I will
stick with my colorful blueprints. AND NOW THE BIG TWIST
THAT NO ONE IS EXPECTING!! Technically, I had already chosen Unreal Engine
as my engine of choice, like 1 or 2 months
before this whole Unity thing. I was going to make
this video anyways, the only difference is that if
I ever wanted to make a 2D game or if I had an idea for a game where using
Unreal would be overkill, I would gladly go back
to Unity and make that game. Because don't get me
wrong, bad management aside, Unity is a
fantastic engine that allowed me and so many
developers to create their games. Most of the devlogs in this
channel are from games I made with Unity. However, since this
whole pay-per-install thing happened, I had no
intention of ever using Unity again. Unity was dead to me! because I could not trust the
people managing the engine. But since the CEO is
gone, I might reconsider. I still need to
wait and see who the new CEO is and
their plans for the engine, but I'm hoping it
will be someone with a true passion for
games and game development. Now, maybe a few of you are probably asking "Have you heard of Godot?" "Why not give
Godot a try?" "Godot could never pull the
same bull Unity pulled." And yes,
technically you are correct. But remember in the beginning
when I showed you the games I made? Well, one of
them was made in Unreal, meaning that I already
kinda know how Unreal works, and for Godot I would
basically need to start all over again. However, this whole Unity
fire just proved that knowing multiple engines is not a bad thing at all. Which in that case... maybe I... Should I learn Godot?
