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Comment by cwkoss | Hacker News Reader

Unity games are not going to strongly compete with Steam. Unity engine just isn't performant enough. I think this is more for mobile-style casual games: think flash games with 3D instead of 2D graphics. Will probably make a chunk of change from bored homemakers, but it isn't going to pull marketshare from 'PC master race'-type Steam gamers.

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Unity is powerful enough for 3D open world games (http://www.firewatchgame.com/).

I was under the impression that Unity and Unreal were basically comparable engines - is this not the case?

>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.

> Unity is powerful enough for 3D open world games (http://www.firewatchgame.com/).

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 played it on PC and had no issues (Windows machine with an old GTX480 Nvidia GPU and 8GB RAM).

That's only a sample size of two though so not sure if people generally have problems with it or not.

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).

Unity Engine is definitely performant enough. Unity's low barrier to entry is likely why there are so many low-quality, poorly developed games using the engine.

As a professional game dev, my gut guess is that maybe 75% of new games on Steam are written using Unity. Maybe more.

Oculus quoted that 90℅ of their original distribution platform (Oculus Share) was made with Unity.

>Unity engine just isn't performant enough

I'm sorry, but do you really know what you're talking about? Unity is head and shoulders above UE4 these days, especially when it comes to lighting. For VR it's really not even a question that Unity is the only solid choice right now. Valve built the entire "The Lab" experience in Unity which is widely regarded as the finest VR experience thus far.

Hearthstone? One of the most played Blizzard game, 50 million players

As someone who has played Hearthstone since beta, it's definitely a casual focused, run on anything, not performance dependent type of game.

That sounds like a better business to me - there are a lot more bored housemakers than hardcode gamers. In the future, it might balance out, but for now, getting spare change from a large chunk of the adult population is nothing to sneer at.

Performance isn't really an issue with Unity although I suspect on average Unity games may be less optimized due to the relatively small or inexperienced developers that are the engine's bread and butter. (I'll admit this is a sweeping generalization though.)

Doesn't VR require some pretty heavy hardware? Is the casual gaming market really going to have that?

Some have PS4s. That's plenty beefy enough. They might even pay for the VR equipment too if it's cheap enough and becomes a multiplayer experience. Think mario party for the wii, but with VR instead.

> Some have PS4s. That's plenty beefy enough.

Sony has their own competing VR solution, though. That said, I seem to recall some talk about the Xbox One (maybe just their Scorpio refresh?) supporting the Rift, but I can't recall details offhand.

There's been no official announcement about XBox One supporting VR. It's all been speculation. It would make sense for them to wait until the Scorpio refresh though.

> Some have PS4s. That's plenty beefy enough

Not really though.

Going based on what Will Smith (the guy who runs The Foo Show) has said on various podcasts, a heavily stylized, low-poly look works well for VR since there isn't as much of an uncanny valley and it substantially lowers the hardware requirements. Superhot, Firewatch, etc., are good examples there, and can be tuned to require less processing power to run.

Remember, there's already GearVR, and that runs off of a mobile phone.

Even when it's exclusively on Unity? I thought Unity's trade-off was ease-of-development for performance.

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