Unity vs Unreal

[ben]

This is a big topic, and I’ve made it a wiki so we can distill ideas into the top of the topic.

I’ll get us started on Unity vs. Unreal…

By Platform

• Unity for mobile games (2D and 3D)
• Unity for 2D and 2.5D console and PC games
• Unreal for 3D console and 3D games (especially FPSs)
• Either for VR, they both have good support

By Experience Level

• Unity for complete beginners
• Unreal C++ to improve your skills, but…
• Unreal using Blueprint make it super accessible

By Language

• Unity uses C# [formerly: UnityScript (JavaScript)]
• Unreal uses C++ OR Blueprint visual programming

By Game Genre

• Unreal for FPS, it’s its heritage

By Team Collaboration

• Unity and Unreal both support bringing your own version control to the project, as demonstrated in Ben’s courses.
• Unity provides paid deep integration with their own hosted collaboration service.
• Unreal provides free deep integration with Perforce, with your choice of host.

By Official Educational Material

• Unity produces video tutorials that tend to release alongside UNITE conferences.
• Unity offers paid certification courses.
• Unreal provides video tutorials as well as a community wiki.
• Unreal provides live weekly learning on Twitch every Tuesday. Including answering questions from the chat.

By Community Events

• Unity holds a number of UNITE conferences each year.
• Unreal holds monthly game jam’s with prizes for both winners and participants.

By VR Support

• Both support the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift
• Both allow in editor use of VR to build your game.
• Unreal games released on the Oculus Store will owe no royalties for the first 5 million USD. Oculus will pay your royalties for you up to that point.

By Licensing Model

• Unity is free for the first $100,000 USD revenue with restrictions on some parts of the editor.
• Unity is $35 USD per person per month when revenue is between $100,001 USD and $200,000 with a few restrictions removed.
• Unity is $125 USD per person per month when revenue is above $200,000 USD with all restrictions removed.
• Unreal is free for the first $1 million in gross revenue per title, no engine restrictions.
• Unreal does not need you to report revenue under 10K per quarter after the above.
• Unreal takes no royalties if your project falls into certain categories including amusement park rides, arcade machines, video entertainment rendering, advertising, and others.
• After all the exemptions Epic takes 5% on gross revenue.

Other Factors

• Unity has its own Asset store for free and paid assets from other creators
• Unreal has a market place that does monthly asset giveaways for free
• Unreal’s source code is available
• Unreal has Quixel (https://quixel.com and http://quixel.com/megascans) as an asset library for textures for free use in Unreal and which can save time and hassle finding good free textures.
• Unreal has Metahuman for creating quick prototyping of characters suitable for small and solo developers

[Bryant_Schaper]

Ah, let the war begin. Such a can of worms topic, I hope for a pleasant, polite and enriching discussion as I agree both have their merits and best uses.

[Valkrysa]

Reply to: By Experience Level
When I was starting out with Unity it was really easy to begin as the documentation and help has covered every topic a million times. However I also believe that Blueprints are a game changer and that they add a completely new vector for getting people to code and thus make their games a reality.

Edit: Additionally, Blueprints can be great for those that are traditional coders as well! I am a professional programmer for a living but when I work in Unreal I choose to use Blueprints anyways due to the pleasure of seeing the code laid out in a visual way.

[Mark_Carroll]

Well it’s a tough question for a startup unity without a doubt has the accessibility. Unreal however has the horsepower for 3d and has paper for 2d. I don’t think the learning curve is that bad on unreal so that’s my favourite. Still best to learn how to use both for maximum flexibility.

[Phillipe]

I think Unreal is a few steps close to win this war, Epic just needs to improve the 2D and mobile support to stand up against Unity. Just my opinion, though.

[HeadClot]

I would like to point out that Unreal Engine has community support for the following languages. You are not just forced to use BP or C++.

Python - Link
Javascript - Link

I would link SkookumScript but I cannot link more than two because I am a new user

[Valkrysa]

Great point @HeadClot !
Here is the link to skookum
Skookum Link

Another great thing is that these community supported languages come at no extra cost~

[DaveB]

It’s hard for me to compare as I was first introduced to Unity and am learning Unreal now. So there is definitely a “I got used to this first” bias. However, as I have started building larger scope games in Unity, and hopefully in Unreal as well, more of the power and benefits of each will present themselves for a full evaluation.

[gauravsin]

I have no idea about Unity. Started with Unreal about a month and a half back. Did some research on both. I know that Unreal is free until you ship your game for profit, but, Unity charges some extra fee for full content. I am not a full-on game developer, but I’d like to know from experienced people. Thanks
.

[Andres_Micalizzi]

Awesome topic… not want to sound like a fanboy but… UE RULES!!!

Now, speaking seriously, i’ll be replying:

By Experience Level - Languajes:

I started 2 years ago as a complete noob (well i had learnt a smattering of c, c++ and c# over the years) but i dind’t have proper knowledge to produce anything. Started with GameMaker and then went onto Unity… Learnt quite a bit and i got to say Unity is pretty simple, buuuut… UE4 blows it out of the water on simplicity (at least in my perspective)… C# is a bit easier to code than C++, but UE has Blueprint that is an awesome tool for total noobs, and you can accomplish anything with it…

— By Platform: it all depends on what you want to develop for… Unity is has advantage on the mobile segment, but UE is almost a market standard for Consoles and PC (count how many games, made by big developers you’ve seen using UDK - UE4 vs Unity, and you’ll see what i’m talking about).

— Game Genre: UE might inherit a lot and be kind of geared toward FPS but it’s capable of doing almost any genre quite easily, I’m working on a racing game ATM and it’s been quite easy to implement (with the vehicle behaviors from the engine), made a couple other protos, and i got to say those templates on the start up clearly show the variety that UE is capable of… Unity on the other hand for what i’ve seen and worked on it, i feel has a firmer stand on platformers 2D/2.5D games…

— other factors: 5% profit deduction when launched, when you’re starting up is way better what Unity is charging for you to enter all platforms (a lot of licensing fees)… If you’re a smash hit, maybe Unity would have been cheaper… the source code for UE is a great factor for considering UE, you can extend it to your heart’s content and really gut it if you have the time/know-how…

[Sarr]

Hmm, sorry but seriously you seem really far behind the current state of Unity.
Now Unity is completely free and charges for nothing. Free version has in it everything that paid versions have. Even multiplayer is free up to 20 CCU, and then really cheap. Also has integrated versioning, where all developers, without using GIT, can synchronize and diff their code + all assets. Yup, whole projects on Unity cloud.
I also see very fast and well thought-out development. Very frequent Updates. We just got 5.4 stable, and 5.5 is available for beta testing about a month later. Graphic features that UE has - seems like everything, including better optimization, is coming to Unity and it’s going faster and faster. Some of the new features are really great.
I think pretty soon there will come a time when Unity has everything graphic-wise that UE has, maybe even performance in real AAA+ graphics based, bigger projects. Plus C#, minus Blueprints - but Asset Store is thriving, and already has numerous visual scripting addons, some of which represent visual-C# via which you can learn real coding, not using som artificial Blueprint which won’t be of much use out of Unreal Engine.
Personally, I’m still quite new to C# and making games, but I couldn’t start with UE. I started with Unity, love C#, and it goes better and better. Of course, I think about changing to UE when I get into really serious, performance-heavy projects, but honestly? I hope that when I’m ready, Unity will be so good that switching to UE won’t make a difference. That’s how it looks to me now. Like Unity is really closer to UE every day, while having much cheaper 10x bigger Asset Store and very big community, frequent updates, blogs from Unity team and so on.
I wouldn’t even rule out a visual scripting interface like Blueprints in Unity in future. It’s all there in Assets store, many versions and approaches to choose from - and they all cost less than you’d expect having experience with UE. Much less, because of big competition and numerous free solutions.

[mBeierling]

For me, one of the biggest points is data driven development, which is much easier in Unreal out of the box.

I started out with Unity and have successfully developed a couple of projects. It took some time, until I understood how important it is to have your data separate from code. You should only code the structure, and should be able to fill this structure with content without writing a single line of code. In Unity I started using NodeCanvas (a paid plugin) to build Behavior Trees for data driven AI, or simple state machines e.g. for UI logic.

Unreal has all of this out of the box, with blueprint. I still love Unity, but when it comes to choosing an Engine for the next project, its very likely that I will recommend Unreal; IF your teammates already have experience with it (EVERYBODY in the team should know how blueprint works), or you have enough time for everybody to learn it.

[shadowmint]

I superficially guess that once you start doing ‘real’ work in UE, (ie. Tank game onwards in the course), the number of people who stick with it falls dramatically.

C++ is hard. Writing good C++ that doesn’t crash is hard. Teaching C++ is hard. …and if you do something wrong, and you get the ‘mysterious segfault’ problem, you are truly, totally screwed, even if you have a debugger that can step through each line of the engine macros one by one.

That’s the downside of UE.

[Bryant_Schaper]

Wow great comments, here is my take:

I honestly think they are both great engines and it more of a preference and this will never have a definitive answer.

For starting out each can do what you want, it comes down to learning how to use each. I am a novice on both, so maybe as I progress to expert game developer I will see bigger differences, but for now this is what I see.

Unreal - C++ has a bit steeper learning curve, but I would not consider that too much. So for me Blueprints may be edging out Unity, for beginning development and rapid prototyping blueprints are cool, and I know that Unity has visual scripting tools, I have playmaker as well, and it does a good job, but support directly from the engine developer is cool, plus all the content from Unreal in their video sessions.

Unity - 2D and mobile it still seems to excel in these areas as well. I know 2D is little more than math and camera angles, so do the same in Unreal is possible.

I am not even going to touch on graphics, nothing I am producing at the moment touches the full capabilities of either engine, so I just can’t comment, fortunately both engines render cubes really well. But, I do like the BSP shapes in Unreal, again great for prototyping until assets are built.

I would love to have time to do the same small project in Unreal, Unity and Unreal Blueprints to get better perspective.

[hypnometal]

I just discovered this thread, but I’m curious why you said definitively Unreal for 3D games? Or is it not so definitive after all, and UE just manages to edge out Unity?

[Aron_Marczylo]

i can see a real benefit to using the blueprints. Kind of a shame Unity doesn’t have something similar in that regard and almost makes me wish I bought the unreal course instead. That being said, however, I had no coding experience when I started so even with the blueprints I’d have no idea how to make things run or even what code to do anything to make it work…

[ben]

No so definitive, I’ve modified my comment. Unity for mobile in general is say at the moment. Also if you find Unity easier to use for a FPS then use that. Ideally you’d have a feel for both tools then decide what to use in what situation. Either can get similar results with varying amounts of effort

[Phantom_Apprentice]

I have both C++ and C# courses , I decided to start with C++ and Unreal because its supposedly harder and if I learn it first it would be easier to get into C# later if I choose to. (I have background in ASM,Pascal , C and AS3 so using Visual studio for the first time already feels like easy-mode)

Unity is pretty popular overall and I guess for now it would be easier to get a job as a mobile game developer, but since C++ is harder and potentially better performing so I imagine that in general there is a demand for that in the general civilian market. .

I already have in mind what I want to do for a project, my only concern is UE4’s support for Dynamic lighting seems less advanced and that makes real time changes to a level somewhat tricky.

[Aron_Marczylo]

After talking with a Dev I found that although the blueprint feature sounds really awesome, it can sometimes slowdown coding.

The issue she had was programming a save game feature and it took for 2 hours using blueprints when in code it would’ve taken her only a few minutes so it appears it’s a bit of a double-edged sword, but it probably still makes it more obvious what part of code is causing an issue in game than how it’s normally laid out.

[Valkrysa]

Updated wiki to expand on licensing information.