>I was under the impression that Unity and Unreal were basically comparable engines - is this not the case?
I'm not 100% intune with game dev, but I always thought Unity was more indy-focused while Unreal was more big boy focused. I know off the back of my head that Unreal powers games like Street Fighter and Bioshock.
I can't really find any other $100MM+ budget games developed with Unity.
Like any engine, Unity has its unique advantages and drawbacks. A small dev team can cover a lot of ground using Unity, and some programming tasks are actually quite pleasant with it. Some people have asserted in this thread that Unity's performance is deficient, but it's easy to write games that run smoothly on a large gamut of devices, whereas UnrealEngine's IDE and even almost empty scenes made with it run at 5fps on my maxed-out 2012 iMac. It might scale better, but Unity beats it handsdown in most low and medium complexity workloads.
These are reasons why Unity is well liked among indies, and not necessarily only among non-technical people either. But if you have many millions to burn, other engines give you more room for customization, have more high-class sales teams, and have a workflow that is optimized to be familiar to artists with a AAA background.
I've been developing a game using UE4 on a 2012 iMac for the past year and I get about 60fps@1080p in the editor on the highest settings. I can comfortably run DS+2 Clients to test multiplayer when I scale it down to Low. The only really slow thing is DebugDraw calls, which I haven't found to be a blocking issue, though it it certainly annoying.
I was amazed to discover that Firewatch (Unity) was pretty playable on my 2013 MacBook Air. I'm wondering though if that's a property of Unity itself, or more of a cultural thing. Could it be that those who use UnrealEngine just focus more on high-end games?
I've used both extensively, and I don't think so. Unity is a fine engine and you can do quality work with it, but Unreal is quite a lot more powerful out of the box.
I've tried Firewatch on both PC and PS4 and never gone through a playthrough that didn't have lag/performance issues even after the patches.
While Firewatch is often cited for what can be accomplished with Unity I don't think it's the gem to show the power of the engine when it can't even support the artistic vision the developers - they certainly know this engine well judging from talks they have given on the engine - tried to inject into it.
I love firewatch but if that's your reference game for technical power it's a really bad sign. Compare that to Paragon or Street Fighter V on Unreal 4. The difference is massive and growing. UE4 is a real deal AAA professional tool set. Unity is great for indies and mobile game devs but has yet to produce anything as technically advanced as UE4.
Certainly doesn't mean that all the UE4 games are better in anyway, I loved Firewatch but it's not a crowning technical achievement.
Unity Engine did displaced the existing market leader by offering a very permissive licensing scheme in comparison. And had already C# as the main programming language, which is miles more accessible than C/C++ for any beginner.
The features are slowly getting on par, but Unreal does offer numerous add-on to the engine to optimise the game (one that caught my eye was a world map analysis).
I was under the impression that Unity and Unreal were basically comparable engines - is this not the case?