Unity vs Unreal (I'm Seriously Considering Switching To Unreal)

I'm a full-time game developer creating indie games for just about every platform out there making more than enough income to support my family and my studio all while using Unity but here's the thing my entire career has been focused on 2D games which are best made in unity now I'm making a 3D game called Twisted Tower and unity wish list below and the growing pains are real at first while making little concept scenes I was impressed by how easy making gorgeous 3D games in unity was but the moment you try to make something a bit big bigger designed with lower performance platforms like Nintendo switch in mind everything starts to get way more complicated in unity from real-time lighting performance issues to lods we'll talk about that in a second Unity is quite frankly falling behind so I reached the Tipping Point last week should I abandon my 10 years of unity knowledge for unreal there's thousands of reasons why you might choose unreal or Unity real quick let's just knock a few of those out of the equation sure sure unreal's visual scripting blueprint is pretty awesome it basically allows

babies to program C++ but I'm not a baby I'm a mature adult and would you look at that Unity has their own visual scripting so I mean who cares at this point Unity also has incredible documentation and way more tutorials on Google and YouTube but Thomas this doesn't have anything to do with production for professionals no but it really does see I've been making games for 10 years I think I'm classified as a professional and I still spend about 30% of my time Googling Solutions while making my games in unity finally there's this idea going around that unreal looks better than Unity this isn't necessarily true for Indie Games frankly because if you're trying to use these features to make an unreal game look better you're kind of making a AAA game and that's a mistake if you're in Indie ultimately what separates unity and unreal is basically a thousand variables that may or may not be relevant for your particular game until now introducing unreal 5 the unity Killer maybe see if you're in Indie making a 3D game unreal

wasn't really a big deal because frankly features were geared towards AAA Studios you'd use unreal to make your game look realistic with lighting and a ton of foliage blah blah blah but for me I didn't really consider it because I was making a stylized 3D game with small scenes but I've begun brainstorming my next 3D game and it involves an open world no that doesn't mean it's going to be hyper realistic or super complicated but what if I simply want to EXP explore a beautiful open world with real-time lighting this is where unreal 5 is so enticing with unreal 5 there's this new tech called nanite nanite basically autogenerator you have a tree for example and as the player moves away from the tree the 3D artist needs to create varying levels of detail just for increased performance see the alternative here is occlusion calling which basically calls out mesh data only

if it's hidden from the camera but what about scenes like this one yeah all those objects need lods but with unreal's nanite technology it's done automatically so what's the catch well there's one and we'll talk about it in just a second okay so what's Unity doing about this are they trying to compete from the research I've done it doesn't seem like they really care at the moment there's this code on GitHub from Unity called Auto LOD but the last commit was more than a year ago so is making the switch to Unreal for nanite worth it the truth is you shouldn't really care about nanite if you're making small 3D games or games that are primarily interior with a low I don't know visual field where objects can just be called out entirely for example in my game Twisted Tower 99% of the game is interior so nanai isn't relevant at all but my next game which is open world Nan is incredibly tempting secondly there's this thing called lumen in unreal lumen is pretty awesome basically it's

realtime Global illumination it just makes your scene look gorgeous it's why this scene with just a simple set of planes and cubes for some reason looks real a single light source will create bounced lighting diffusing and filling in the shadows and adding that extra oomph that Unity just doesn't have well actually it does yay it's called Enlighten oh okay well hold on a minute Enlighten isn't as simple to use as Lumen see Enlighten is a tool that adds diffused lighting but it's primarily focused on baked lighting additionally surprise surprise Unity is throwing out Enlighten entirely which seems to be a habit of unity they take on a new mistress I mean feature randomly and then they throw it out when they've gotten what they wanted it's a huge issue I have with unity the constant adoption and then abandonment of features not to mention the failure to adapt those features to their three yes three render pipelines and how do you choose which one you want to use I'm not

even going to get into that so do Indies need Lumen probably not at least for now and that's because as an indie I want to sell my games on every platform if I'm competing with AAA and I'm also competing with other indie game developers I want as much income as possible from as many platforms as possible for example if Apple reaches out and says they want to buy my game for Apple arcade if my game relies heavily on Lumen and nanite to look beautiful I'm screwed and this wouldn't be the first time Apple arcade actually changed my life with an offer like this I wouldn't want to miss that opportunity again and what about Nintendo 64 uh sorry I mean Nintendo switch yeah I bet you Lumen will not run well on switch porting to switch is very similar to porting to mobile it's best to just strip realtime lighting from your game altogether if you can for performance for example my buddy David wayy had to use invisible rectangles to cast Shadows for his trees on Nintendo switch because the hardware could not handle real-time lighting of foliage so am I going to

switch to Unreal probably not firstly because I just know Unity I've got 10 years of experience according to this random article I found on Google the most efficient language is garati I don't know how to say that Gujarati switching to Unreal is kind of like I don't know westerners abandoning English for Gujarati sure English is ridiculous for example there's a million ways that they're going to spell their but there's just so many years that they've been using their in country Unity along with its documentation and extensive Community is kind of the same secondly although Lumen and nanite might be a perfect solution for my open world game idea I'm not even sure it's going to run on Nintendo switch my guess is no because according to unreal's own documentation Nan is currently supported on PlayStation 5 Xbox and PCs with high-end graphics cards see did you see any reference to it running on a toaster no me neither finally I'm going to make a gamble here I think Unity will compete just fine when they feel like they need

to a Lumin and nanite competitor will likely come out for Unity here's why Unity is still the dominant software they're going to do what they want when they want because they have the market share and wherewithal to do it according to external Labs Unity has a user base of 2.7 billion people whereas unreal has 7 million Unity has a market share of 43% and unreal has a share of 133% this doesn't mean one is better than the other it just means Unity has power they'll be fine and they're going to release what we need when we really need it that's just my opinion leave a comment below if you disagree I would love to hear it so I'm going to keep making games with unity and I won't be surprised when a lumen or nanite alternative appears just when I need it it's not that it won't be challenging and have its issues it's just that I'm not going to shift too unreal right now for something shiny I'll say it though I do think unreal is better in so many ways but I'm going to stick to English McDonald's Bud Light and unity because that's what I'm used to