I stopped caring at no garbage collection.
Substantive criticism is fine, but it should be thoughtful, not snarky and shallow.
Games can certainly be successful in spite of performance problems, but why purposefully introduce them in the first place?
In the case of Notch, he used Java because he was most skilled at Java programming. The garbage collection, procedural generation, and multi-platform availability of the JVM allowed him to successfully release a massive hit as a solo indie developer.
At least that's one way to interpret it. Another way is that, had Notch been as skilled in C++ or (these days) Rust he could have made just as good of a cross platform game (even more so on mobile), that didn't concern itself with resource management outside of RAII and reference counting, was way more performant (no pauses), and in similar time frame as a skilled Java developer.
If you have a great idea use your favorite language. No doubt about that. You might be successful in spite of its specific deficiencies. However, if you are seeking a new language for a certain problem domain - like video games - choosing one with a feature that actively fights one of your fundamental goals (consistent framerate is only going to be a decision your users will regret you made.
It's funny that people like to say "users don't care what language it's written in". The fact that 8th graders know the the minecraft's garbage collector is a problem, suggests that using a garbage collected language for soft-realtime video games results in a seriously leaky abstraction.
This is the only reason C++ is still in wide use today, in order for games to limit load times they have to do nasty 'unsafe' tricks (such as loading a block of memory from disk straight into an address space, and just assigning pointers to it), in order to get good performance. But if your game isn't open world (such as minecraft, GTA, Fallout), then using a garbage collected language will be fine (as long it's not stop the world, but runs concurrently).
They offer garbage collected languages on top of their C++ game engines for scripting game logic. Any significant modifications to the engine will need to be done in C++
The link is for C++ garbage collection in UnrealEngine, not UnrealScript nor Blueprints
Yep. Game-level garbage collected C++. Which is exactly what I said, I just a didn't mention GC on C++ to avoid obscuring my point. I promise you the code at the game-engine-level is manually memory managed C++
BTW: I've written 6 engines for AAA games. 3 of them used reference counting. AAA C++ games use garbage collection all the time. Maybe yours didn't. Mine did. Unreal does. So does Unity
[0] https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Garbage_Collection_Overview
But, I have to acknowledge plenty of games are shipping with garbage collection. Unreal has garbage collection. Unity games have garbage collection. They seem to all be running just fine and there's plenty of large AAA games or close to AAA games made with both engines.