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Comment by tmikaeld | Hacker News Reader

Could a new engine really catch up with Unreal Engine and Unity? They have decades of a head-start here...

Game engines have a unique cycle where cutting edge tech in one year has often turned into a kind technical debt a few years down the road. Thankfully, that cycle has slowed down a lot and things have started to stabilize in major areas like asset pipelines and editing (the true core of modern engines). But it still means that the decades of head start that one might assume shrink down because of the churn.

If you can fund and build a huge skilled team for about five years, you can still catch up enough to cover some game genres competitively and expand from there. But how do you recoup these costs in a market that is now clearly in a race to hit rock bottom?

>race to hit rock bottom?

How so? Unity revenue is north of $500B a year, and I'd expect Unreal Engine to pull similar numbers for Epic annually.

If anything, as the gaming market expanded, these companies have made serious footholds in the revenue stream.

> Unity revenue is north of $500B a year

Is that 2x Apple's revenue?

They're making sales of over a billion dollars every day?

No, Op seem to have mistaken B and M.

This :)

Actually its a fraction of that. First Quarter of '21 Unity made around $230M.[1]

Epic (total) is in the ballpark of around $5B, but the engine alone - I estimate - around 1-5% of it, so also around $50M-$250M.

[1] https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2021/Unity-Ann...

I'm still surprised Microsoft hasn't bought Unity yet.

Knowing how the Mono/Unity3D spat went, it wouldn't be surprising to hear that they've tried but can't come to an agreement on price.

They also have decades of unavoidable baggage. "Disruptive Innovation" theory allows for new competitors to surpass incumbents despite inferior products and lack of depth. We, including you, don't know if there is room for such a disruption. There could be. All we can do is wait and see.

I really hope you're right.

I've never used Unreal, but the GP is absolutely correct in regard to Unity. It is subject to so much churn, and the main architecture is so flawed, the best way to use the engine is to use it the least possible, as basically a glorified renderer and main loop.

The best quote I've seen comes from a comment on a feedback request thread [0] on the Unity Reddit, from andybak:

> It seems that everything that's working is deprecated and everything that's current is unfinished.

The features touted to be the "correct"/"current" way to use the engine are supremely half-baked, and the "old" ways are so inefficient and still buggy after all these years, that I have no words to describe.

I'm basically on the prowl to jump ship to Godot immediately when 4.0 arrives with the new renderer (the current release is not terribly efficient for 3D). It has its warts too, but at least it's architecturally sound, and the source code is very agreeable for someone not very familiar with C++.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/e5g5u2/top_5_unity...

Heck, there is literally no builtin solution for networking. There is a HTTP client, sure, but if you want any sort of realtime multiplayer, you have to use either a separately-billed paid third party, roll your own from sockets directly (good luck supporting WebGL), or use a community-maintained version of the deprecated networking system which frankly is not very good.

> roll your own from sockets directly (good luck supporting WebGL)

I'm sorry (not experienced in graphics) but why would you need WebGL for a multiplayer? Can't you have a normal 3D renderer that has a connection to server?

By "WebGL" they meant build of their game for web browsers that Unity let you create OOTB. So if your game is cross-platform and also support playing it in browser you have a problem: sockets that you can use elsewhere wont work in browser.

Sorry, the Unity crowd calls the browser target "WebGL". Yeah it's a bit silly but such is life.

It's not that you need to care about WebGL-the-technology for your networking, but that there are no provided tools to use, say, WebSockets, when creating games that will run on the browser.

Sure, you could use WebSockets through JS interop and create your own socket library encapsulating that, but it's hella annoying.

It's not new so that's how they are getting caught up. It's more like a new major version of Lumberyard which itself was a fork of Crytek, which was able to ship AAA games (as painful as it was to do).

I know the devs say it's a major rewrite but... come on. You and I have both seen that code monstrosity before.

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