Students Choose Unreal. Why?

Recently in my classes, there has been much debate surrounding the topic of which game engine to use. It’s an important decision, especially for those who are just starting game development, given the multitude of options available. With so many engines out there, choosing the right one for your game can be a daunting decision. While you can always switch to a different engine later on, the one you first start learning becomes a foundational choice for game development. It’s often easier to stick with something familiar than to pick up and learn an entirely new engine.

The way my school approaches teaching engines is solely through experience. The classes tend to leave the choice up to the team or student, allowing for more freedom but also creating more confusion among the students. There have been many instances where some of my team members argue about which engine to use due to their preferences and skill sets. This year, there has been an influx of students who started learning Unreal, which quickly caught my attention. So I thought to break down why this is the case.

What Changed? 

My first thought about why Unreal has become so popular is because of the pricing complications that Unity has faced in the past year. As I’m sure many of you know, Unity introduced some challenging changes earlier this year. These changes directly impacted indie developers primarily and sent shockwaves throughout the game development community. I genuinely don’t think anyone really saw it coming, which catapulted it to the front page of every game news outlet for the better part of a week or two.

Originally, I was quite upset. I understand that, at the end of the day, companies need to make money, but these changes would significantly impact many games, both those in ongoing development and those already released. As expected, in the weeks following this, I saw some developers announce their transition to other engines or openly express their frustration with Unity. Even Massive Monster threatened to pull ‘Cult of the Lamb’ from stores, but thankfully, we can all rest easy as that was just a joke poking fun at Unity. God, I love that game.

As time progressed, I realized that, honestly, this doesn’t affect me much. Although it’s upsetting, I (sadly) don’t intend to become a successful indie developer anytime soon, so I decided to stick with Unity despite the drama. I thought that when the time comes for me to make my mark as an indie developer, I will review the pricing of the engines that interest me and proceed from there. Rest assured, I still have a long way to go before I become the next Dani and create an indie hit wonder like ‘Crab Game’ or ‘Muck.

Realizing the Truth 

In my classes, I felt compelled to be properly prepared in case my preference for Unity was questioned during one of my presentations. So I did a bit of research; I delved deeper into Unity news and uncovered some Unity lore I had not yet read. They had come to retract some terms of their pricing changes. Although not a perfect fix, I still think it is a step in a good direction. They reworked many of their most upsetting changes. Games made in 2023 and earlier in Unity editors will no longer be affected by the new runtime fee changes. Instead, it will only apply to the 2024 and onwards editors. I believe this entirely changes the situation. Previously, indies had to worry about losing a lot of money, and obviously, most indies do not have much money to spare. However, these Unity patch notes completely erase that previous issue. No longer does Massive Monster need to worry about ‘Cult of the Lamb’ making significantly less money; only indies who plan to work in the 2024 version need to worry about that. There were other great changes in the patch notes, but this is the one that is brought up by most.

So the severe lack of Unity used by my peers at school seems to simply be caused by the simple misinformation that has been spreading online.