I was merely stating that if we are going to debate, then facts should be brought to the discussion, not assumptions that you can "only create simple 2D games and prototypes" with Unity. The first page of replies to this thread made this claim several times.

Plenty of people disagree. You should post your disagreement rather than retreating from the discussion. You're as much of "the forum" as the people posting incorrect facts. The vast majority of professional studios that I've met in my local area use Unity :wink:

So again: Unreal is far cheaper for hobbyists, Unity is far cheaper for professionals.

I agree with this, not taking into account AAA as professionals

Even in the AAA space (ignoring your point out the extra cost of tools / actual systems work that you have to do yourself!!) Unity is way cheaper than Unreal.
Say you've got 50 people on $80k salaries working for a year, that's a mere $75K in Unity licensing. With those staff, your budget is probably over $5M to break even though, so Unreal is going to cost you 5% royalty * $5M / 70% retail cut, or over $350K. I'm guessing that most AAA studios who use Unreal would go direct to Epic and negotiate to pay a quarter million or some such figure up-front instead of taking the royalty deal.

a person who has worked with one (Unity) for two years professionally, I think I can make some contribution to this thread.

I think Maxest makes the most valid defence for Unity. That is for a developer who has been using Unity for a year or more, changing to Unreal would be difficult; because the approaches the two engines use, to game development, are the exact opposite.

However for newcomers to game development, the rewards of learning Unreal over Unity would be large; although a more difficult task.

Yea I feel that this is true. I've been using Unity for a while now, and when I had to switch to Unreal for another project I had to do, it was pretty tough to switch over. Unreal really approaches dev quite differently than Unity. The approach, imo, is more personal preference than anything else. Although it does seem that a lot of people really like the blueprint system?

Costs are an interesting question I never really considered. I don't do any of my work for professional/for profit. I do it more for fun than anything else (though I do love viewership haha). It's interesting to see how costs compare against one another. I do as much as I can for free, unless doing so really hinders quality, at which point I go ahead and buy things.

@ScoutingNinja: what documentation did you find barren for Unity? I'm really curious about this.

@eatsleepindie: Calm down. No one is suggesting that it's amateurish to use Unity or Unreal as opposed to an engine you wrote. I haven't seen any posts alluding that Unity is only useful for 2d games and prototypes. And in any case, this is just a discussion to discuss what engine people like and why. It's just casual game engine gossip (hence why I posted it in the lounge).

This was an interesting article I read some time back. It compares Unreal and Unity side by side. Now it may not be the best source, so I'll let people decide: http://not-lonely.com/blog/making-of/unity-ue-comparison/

It seems that lighting in Unreal is somewhat better than in Unity from this example at least. I'd love to hear some thoughts (especially on the veracity of the article).

Interesting topic, so i give a opinion as well - even though i am not a professional game developer, just another hobbiest since two decates:

I made dozens 2D game prototypes in different environments with different tools, including unity 4/5 and unreal engine 4,

but i never shipped a finished game with that - so keep that in mind when i give you my comparison:

Unity:

- Scripting in C# and JavaScript was really simple and straightforward

- Very easy to handle entity components and adding entity behaviours

- Prefabs are really nice

- No integrated Tilemap editor: Reason why i always made 3D Playgrounds in Unity and not 2D

- Hard to follow control flow

- How to debug, i never found a way except for stupidly printing out ????

- Had never trouble upgrading my projects from a minor version update

UE4:

- Blueprint Scripting is really nice, but only for people who dont care about code or do not know how to code -> for me as a programmer it always gets in my way, but for simple things this is just fine

- Has a integrated debugger which works quite good

- Hard to follow control flow

- Really great graphics quality in 3D when just looking at the sample applications

- 2D Sprite support was just basics when i made my platformer

- A integrated 2D tilemap editor with a lot of potential, but still not quite good

- Git integration was extremely broken when i made my platformer

- Creating entities, adding components was not that straightforward

- Version upgrade madness had driven me crazy

- Controlling sprite quality was pretty hard (2D pixel game without artifacts)

Summary:

Unreal engine 4 was pretty good at first glance, but after working with it for a while - there was a lot of issues regarding version control and version upgrades. As a matter of fact, i lost a lot of work due to this madness :-(

For Unity i never made nothing more than just simple playgrounds testing out different game mechanics and this was working totally fine, so i cannot say much about that.

Now i am making everything myself in C with a few C++ features, without using any libraries - building my own framework, but not an engine. So i have full control over everything, know where everything starts, how the game control flow works and most important: Never need to fiddle around with bad third party APIs - except for low level operating system and graphics driver stuff.

I just want to create my game i am dreaming off since i was a kid - nothing more.