If Blueprints have really become the default in Unreal, why are they so barely talked about? Searching for "unreal blueprints" on Google returns less than two full pages. Do you work in the industry?
I am about to "work" in the industry I have a Blender plugin and Unreal editor plugin in the works , none of the use a VPL by the way because simply what I am trying to do is too technical for VPLs that target users and not coders. But of course I will be offering VPL support because users love VPLs.
I never said Blueprints are the default in Unreal , C++ is still king. However if you want proof , you can take a visit at the official Youtube channel of Unreal by Epic and see for yourself the rise of Blueprints. Most tutorials nowdays for making games with Unreal target Blueprints.
I do agree that Google's not evidence of anything, I just use it as a first approximation when I have no better sources. That said, the marketing channel of a company trying to push its tech doesn't really satisfy me either.
Of course how much Blueprints will be used will depend on the game. There are games made entirely with Blueprints.
Also Epic recommends the use of Blueprints as first choice again because of ease of use. They have invested a great deal to it after all. It even has a debugger with break points , watching values and visualization of execution flow.
If I go to the last page of a Google search for C++, it says that it showed me 180 results. 18 pages.
It used to be that Google would tell you an approximation of how many matches they actually had in total for a search of their index but they no longer do anywhere that I am aware of. If there were only two pages of results I might have agreed but when there are 12 pages it will show to me I don't think there is any useful conclusion to be made about the actual total amount of sites that contain these keywords.
However, there is another site that still gives us an approximate count of results. YouTube.
Searching for C++ on YouTube I am told that there are "about 1,010,000 results".
Searching for Unreal Blueprints on YouTube I am told that there are "about 57,800 results".
Searching for UDK Blueprints on YouTube gives "about 18,600 results".
There will be some amount of overlap between the latter two.
I don't know how many of those videos matched only blueprints and was included though.
But let's do another couple of searches.
UDK C++ on YouTube gives "about 11,000 results".
Unreal C++ on YouTube gives "about 60,900 results".
Well, it seems that the words UDK and Unreal are significant when searching on YouTube, since otherwise both of those searches should have given about a million results like the search for just C++ alone did.
So comparing "Unreal C++" and "Unreal Blueprints" on YouTube actually gives a surprisingly high amount of results about blueprints compared to C++ for Unreal, certainly a lot higher than I would have expected. I would have expected at least 25 times as many for C++ but it seems to be almost the same amount of videos for each of those.
Of course one might wonder if even though the words Unreal and UDK might have matched correctly, did the words blueprints and C++? Or do the results include a lot of videos that are about neither blueprints nor C++?
Additionally some amount of videos will have both these words but will not be about the Unreal Development Kit. Instead one video might be something like "Unreal! Secret blueprints confirming conspiracy theory so-and-so confirmed!" You get the idea.
YouTube's search is wonky, after a few pages it starts to omit words. I got a video for a blueprint of a building (no "unreal" mentioned anywhere).