You may disagree, but this comes from someone who can back it up.
I’ve heard nothing but negative things about Unreal. Why is it used so widely? Is Epic basically paying devs to do so with lenient royalty fees or whatever?
It’s mostly legacy at this point, it used to be the easiest way to get top of the line graphics while being performant. There was a time when every new console game used unreal and had the same plastic toy soldier look to it, because thats just how the unreal engine rendered things at the time. But it was incredibly easy to use and most devs had some experience with modding unreal tournament in some way at the time.
So it established itself in the industry, and large publishers made deals with epic, and devs had to learn it in school when game dev started getting taught in school, and so on. If you wanted to work in AAA game dev from 2005-2015 you learned how to use the unreal engine.
But epic got lazy, and devs kept using the engine as a hammer even in games where it just didn’t make sense, so now we’re here. Unreal is fantastic for stage based or single map multiplayer fps games that you want to look the best contemporary technology can look. It can be forced to do anything like any engine can, of course, but it’s hard. However epic still wants money and sells it to all sorts of publishers and dev teams.
Oh wow, Unreal is a mediocre engine? Who could have guessed?
They really buried that this is an 11 month old quote…
But yeah, I was guilty of expecting a groachical experience like Seluna’s without realizing the trade off was an N64 level of being stuck on rails.
5ish years from now it could be different.
But it’s not about making the best games, it’s about making the most money.
If you have a propitiatory engine, your hiring base is limited. And studios don’t want long-term employees, so they want generic engines with a readily available labor pool.
