Why I'm Sticking With Unity (Unity vs. Unreal)

not a huge fan of Unity's leadership, but we're going to talk about why I'm still going to make games with Unity. Now, if we're going to do this properly, we need to do a pros and cons list. Okay, so let's go ahead and jump into this pros and cons list. Considering this is a contentious topic, number one, I am not sponsored by Unity. That would be evil of me. Number two, I'm going to offer an Unreal course in my online program. And number three, I am also learning Unreal as a backup. Okay, let's go. By the way, we're just going to focus on Unity versus Unreal, okay? Not going to talk about GDAU in this video, okay? That's for a future video. Um, here's just a list of games that I've made with Unity. And here are also a list of games made with Unreal. As you can see, the overarching theme with a lot of these games in Unity is it's more of an eclectic mix. There's a lot of indie games here, 2D games, low-end 3D game games. You can see that Call of Duty here. Oh, that's a high-end game. No, it's not. Call of Duty Mobile is what was made with Unity. So, as you can

see here, they're just beautiful artsy games like Cult of the Lamb, right? Whereas what you might see with, let's say, Unreal, what you're going to see with Unreal is you're going to see more high-end 3D games like Batman, uh, Arkham City, right? My game Twisted Tower is more of a double A 3D game, right? this game would probably look better and it would probably be better um more conducive to be built in Unreal, but I just chose to use Unity. So, I think that Twisted Tower is a great example of an exception to the Unity rule. Also, there's exceptions to the Unreal rule, right? Octopath Traveler. Moving forward, let's shift to the ownership conversation. This one's a big deal. This one is a very big deal. Unity is publicly traded. Okay, so that means that the owners have less control. There's increased scrutiny. Investors have control. There's pressure with shareholders. And there's also just slow decisions being made. And honestly, even though those decisions are being made

slowly, sometimes they're bad decisions because they're not for your benefit. They're for the shareholders benefit. And Unity did this recently when they did their silly pricing structure announcement, which we're going to talk about. Unreal, on the other hand, is privately owned, right? So, the owners have more control. Decisions are faster and more focused. closer to the customer's uh needs, right? Flexible management structure. In the case of Unreal, it's Tim Sweeney who's the CEO. And uh with Unity, it's John Rissetello. Um I think that's how you say his name. He's in terms of like the 45minute conversation I had with him. He's a great guy. He's a really nice guy. I hate the decision he made. I think it's a terrible decision about the pricing structure. Again, we're going to talk about that. But it doesn't mean I have to hate John. Okay? John seems like a very nice guy. But of course, we really shouldn't be kidding ourselves here. Let's let's go ahead and do a Google search. Uh who owns uh Epic. Okay, let's take a look here. Well, it says Tim Sweeney, right? But

let's see here. Um okay. Oh, Tensson, right? The Chinese conglomerate and largest video game company in the world. 40% stake of Epic Games in 2012. Oh, Sony. What? Sony owns some of it. Wow. Kirkby, what? What? Which is associated with LEGO, right? So, it's not that this is a bad thing. It's just that you have to remember that, you know, just because Epic Games is privately held doesn't mean there aren't other people who have a say in what happens, right? But this is not the reason why I'm choosing Unity. The the the real reason might surprise you. Let's talk about their pricing. And this is directly related to being publicly traded, right? Unity being publicly traded, you'll notice their decisions have gotten worse and worse the moment they became publicly traded, whereas Unreal has had a lot more consistent decisions. Okay. All right. Let's jump to Unity's pricing.

Yes, it's a better option currently, but it's inconsistent. This was posted September 12th, and a lot of you already know about this, but this was posted on December 12th or September 12th. So, the rule specifically is over $200,000 and over 200,000 installs, you owe 20. Well, everyone freaked out about this. It was a terrible decision. Mainly because the algorithm determining whether you actually sold 200,000 copies was an opaque algorithm. It was basically kind of like malware put into your your game and Unity tracks how many installs occur and you have no idea. So, why is this a problem? Well, Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, piracy. How does Unity know which is which, right? So, this is scary because a lot of developers are wondering, are they going to owe Unity a hefty fee? Okay, so they backpedal. Well, that's great. You know, Mark Whitten posted this open letter to the community. Mark Whitten said that basically he wants to backpedal and he's

going to do something better than Unreal. It's going to be 2 and a.5% over a million dollars. That's great, right? That's great. Two and a half% of self-reported data over a million dollars. That's all you owe. This is certainly great relative to Unreal. But of course, the problem is this word right here, inconsistent, right? Unity's pricing structure is inconsistent. And that's scary because, well, you might not owe money now, but are you going to owe money in the future? Right? Is Unity going to Is the leadership going to continue to spiral out of control? I don't know, right? It's kind of a It's kind of a gamble. Right now, the pricing structure is the better option on paper with Unity. Now, I don't trust Unity necessarily that they're going to not change their pricing structure, but I do trust you guys and I trust the game development community. Uh, I trust that

you will obliterate Unity stock the next time they try and make a move like this. And I think that that means that they're unlikely to do some something like this again because they know it'll just completely destroy their company. I know I sound naive. I know I sound naive. So, to prove that I'm not naive, just know that I am learning Unreal right now as well as a backup. But I think for the foreseeable future, Unity is not going to try and pull something like this again. Right. Maybe. Let me know in the comments what you think, guys. Unity is well, it's less modular. Okay, so when it comes to being plugandplay to just sort of open the software and start making a game, Unity is less modular. At least in the actual, you know, creating a new project. There aren't templates, right? There's no frameworks. Whereas with Unreal, you have templates and you have frameworks. For example, you can create a first-person shooter immediately with Unreal. You just click the template and you're ready to go. You have your

controller, you have your gun. In Unity, you don't have that. Mainly mainly what makes Unity less modular is the coding from scratch aspect. Granted, there is a visual scripting tool that's being built with Unity, very much like blueprints with Unreal. But the problem is is that it's not it's it's still young. It's not mature. But is this actually a problem? Well, if you're a developer like me, you love coding from scratch. I love C. It's one of my favorite things to do to to to code with C. Um, it's kind of almost like playing an instrument or or speaking a language. It's enjoyable to to have a conversation with Unity in C. Um, I really do enjoy it. And I I I tried using blueprints and I' I've tried using visual scripting and I just keep going back to coding from scratch because that it's not because it's better necessarily. It's because that's what I'm used to, right? I've been doing

this for 15 years. I've been writing code for 10. I don't think I'm going to change. I'm getting old, right? I'm just not going to change. You can't teach an old dog new tricks. Whereas with Unreal, there's a lot of cool tricks to learn and I'm just I don't know if I'm going to learn them. I don't think I'm going to learn blueprints. And I think a lot of you are the same. Let me know in the comments if you feel that way. So that for me is why I prefer Unity. Whereas for those of you who don't want to learn to code, Unreal is a better option. It could very well be a better option. So here's an example. Here's the Unity start screen. What do you see here? Well, you can make a 2D game and a 3D game. You can make a 3D game with extras. And that's about it. Um, but overall we do not have what Unity H or Unreal has, right? We've got a blank project. We have a first-person project, a third person project, top down handheld AR, virtual reality, a vehicle game, right? And then there's all these other types of templates. Film architecture,

automotive, simulation. The list goes on with Unreal. Let's move on to support. Okay, this one's a big deal for me. Currently, Unity is just it's just got a bigger presence, right? It's got a bigger I would call it a Google presence. Googling a solution for Unity is rapid fire. Every single issue you have with Unity, and believe me, there's a ton. Unity, Unity has a lot of issues, and I would argue it probably has less issues than Unreal. Uh just cuz I don't know, they just don't update it enough. Um and it's definitely behind with tech, and we'll talk about that. But googling stuff with Unity is so fast. Uh Steph indie games, one of my Twitter followers said the number one pro is the asset store and the number two pro is the documentation in the community. Um whereas you know with with Unreal Engine, you can see from Cold Sector u the cons is you know a huge installation uh size but also just less tutorials on

you on YouTube you just have so many more high quality tutorials for Unity. Now, of course, there are tutorials for Unreal. There is a community for Unreal, but it's just not as good. It's not as good. The documentation with Unity top tier. I've never seen documentation so well thought out and put in layman terms as the the Unity documentation. Okay. So, I've tried to distill this down in a simple chart. Okay. Unity generally across the board is good with low-end, high-end or low-end 2D, high-end 2D, and low-end 3D. The moment you want to make high-end 3D, with Unity, it's down down the drain. Okay, they're getting better with HDRP, we'll talk about that in a second. HDRP is one of their render pipelines, but Unreal, it's focused on the high-end 3D games. That is what it's for, right? It doesn't mean you can't make low-end 2D and high-end 2D, but because again

the community, the documentation, the tutorials, the the tools available, the assets available, Unity is more like on average across the board, it's just more versatile there. You can you can do more styles of games with it. But if you want to do high-end 3D games, that's what Unreal is for. Okay, so let's go ahead and take a look at Unity here. It's great for low-end hardware. Why? Why is it great for low-end hardware? Well, if I take a look here at Unity's render pipelines, you can see here there's a lot to choose from. And this is actually kind of a con with Unity. Um, it's not the greatest thing ever. Um, if you are prone to getting confused, but but Unity does have a variety of render pipelines to work with, right? Um, the built-in render pipeline, um, is great for for, you know, um, making just sort of mobile games, Nintendo Switch, um, Xbox,

PlayStation, low-end PC games. That's what this render pipeline is for, right? Um, whereas HDRP, the highdeinition render pipeline is great for, sure, a high-end PC, right? maybe Xbox and PlayStation, but if you want to make a Switch game in a mobile game, high high definitionition render pipeline, which is more comparable to Unreal. Uh that's the that's the render pipeline you're going to need to use. And so you can see here we can pick from all these different render pipelines. And those render pipelines allow us to port to a variety of different pieces of hardware with all varying degrees of performance. Whereas Unreal has tools designed specifically for higherend hardware. For example, I hear this all the time. Oh, Thomas, you've got to use Unreal. You've got to use Unreal because of Lumen. You've got to use Lumen. You've got to use uh Nanite. And by the way, Lumen is is a basically a post-processing uh global illumination, which basically

means that the light is going to reflect and scatter to to uh a variety of surfaces. And it just looks amazing. And it really does. It's amazing. But if you want to use Lumen on, let's say, Nintendo Switch or mobile or low-end PCs, good luck. It's It's really not built for that. It's not built for that. And that's the thing. That's the thing, right? It limits your market. And if you want to make an indie game and you want to port it to Switch or mobile or low-end PC, you're not going to be able to do it. Okay? So, that's why Lumen, yes, it is great, but it's not great for every platform. The same is true with nanite. So lumen and nanite. Nanite being the ability to place basically just millions, almost an infinite amount of 3D objects in your scene. That tech is amazing, but it's not for every platform. It's not for mobile and it's not for Switch. This is actually confirmed by one of the developers of Cult of the Lamb. This is Jim. He's one

of the artists for Cult of the Lamb. Um he says that exporting to all platforms um is a big one for us in particular Jim is talking about console something other alternatives like GDAU don't currently offer. So that's why Unity is so effective. It's great. It's great for multiple platforms and also as as someone who has ported to to console to Switch to Xbox and PlayStation, I can tell you the documentation for and the tools available for porting from Unity are are there's just a a plethora of of documentation available. Um whereas with Unreal, the porting process is less friendly. And I've heard this from publishers. uh publishers mentioned, yes, you know, porting to to various consoles with Unreal is great, but the the documentation also just the available contractors to help port are number one going to be difficult to find. Um, but also they're going to be more expensive. Contractors meaning just

people to help port, right? A lot of times independent developers will hire out contractors to help them port to these various platforms. With Unreal, it's a little bit more difficult. So again, Unity is great overall for not only the hardware of a variety of platforms, but also just the documentation and the support of getting it to these platforms. Um, and my fourth cherry on top reason is because we've invested over six figures in our game, Twisted Tower. Um, we've invested two years of our time in Twisted Tower. And so we're not going to ditch Unity to rebuild Twisted Tower in Unreal. Okay. So, that's why for our current project, we're sticking with Unity. Um, for future projects, we have this uh firsterson shooter toolkit or game kit that we've created from scratch. My team, uh, including AJ, who's the the developer of this game kit. They've done an incredible job creating this first-person shooter kit. So, it really

comes down to investment. We've invested a ton of resources in this first-person shooter game kit and we're going to use it for future projects. And I think it would be foolish of me to just abandon that game kit um that we've created and not create other other games quicker and faster inside of Unity for the foreseeable future. In conclusion, am I abandoning Unity? No. But am I going to learn Unreal? Yes. And I I see that Brachie's just posted that they're going to be learning GDAU. I think that's awesome. I'm not telling anybody to jump ship to Unreal. I am saying you should probably learn Unreal. You should always know multiple softwares. And if you're like me and you like a versatile experience of creating a ton of different kinds of games for a variety of platforms, it's good to know Unity. It's good to know Unreal. All right, guys. That's what I've got for