What is it that Unity has that these companies have been so unable to replicate? Surely they don't want another player in the scene to compete with their engines.
Unity uses C# and runs pretty well on weaker devices (dev and client side). It also crashes a lot less.
Freelancer Unreal Developers are approximately double the cost and 1/20th as plentiful as Unity developers.
And no, you can't develop a complete project in Blueprints:
https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/
Unity had no choice but to split into HDRP and URP, because the gulf between next-gen consoles (high-end) and mobile (low-end) is going to become enormous. High-end will be completely dominated by raytracing, replacing traditional lighting, for example.
However it looks like Unity have really mismanaged this division and have totally siloed the two teams working on each pipelines.
They also require their Asset Store creators to provide more long-term support than they do for their own official Demos:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/please-stop-with-your-madnes...
Interestingly, as someone who started playing Fortnite on Switch, one of the pros I enjoy listening to has said that he actually would prefer playing on mobile to playing on the Switch, because the mobile version is more streamlined, so it actually performs better even though the hardware is weaker.
All I know is that it's way, way nicer on PS4, but I would expect that of course.
Look at the crashes and performance problems of Industries of Titan on PC, or the visuals of Mutant Year Zero on Switch for examples from regular devs.
Unity enables you to double dip on your engine knowledge to work on anything from simple 2D games for WebGL or mobile devices, to large AA productions, yet remains relatively lightweight as a tool, even on the large scale end of things.
It uses C# for scripting as the one true way of doing things and not some second class citizen. C# is just incredibly good. It's performant, exactly in the right spot on the rigid-flexible axis, and has fantastic tooling and learning resources.
I'm keeping a close eye on Godot and will be trying it for some tiny projects after I'm done with my current game, but it doesn't look like it's quite there yet.
The best tools grow first alongside a real product. Building a tool without a target product almost always misses the mark.
Naughty Dog by Sony
> In all honesty, the biggest reason we're not using GOAL for next-gen development is because we're now part of Sony. I can only imagine Sony's shock when they purchased Naughty Dog a few years back, hoping to be able to leverage some of our technology across other Sony studios, and then realized that there was no way anyone else would be able to use any of our codebase. Sony wants us to be able to share code with other studios, and this works both ways - both other studios using our code and vice versa. Add this to the difficulty curve of learning a new language for new hires, lack of support from external development tools (we had our own compiler, linker, and debugger, and pretty much had to use Emacs as our IDE), etc, means that there are clearly a lot of other factors involved. Note, however, that these issues aren't really technical problems, they're social ones.
— Scott Shumaker
There is no evidence to back this claim up. There are > 10000 shipping games made with Unity, maybe 100000. And there are many hit games made with it as well. I'm not claiming they are or are not as good "technically" but they shipped, made lots of players happy, made their developers proud and successful so no mark was missed just because Unity started as tool without a real product alongside.
If fact I'd argue the opposite, most teams that make their own engines have the worst tools because they have a limited budget and limit time and they've given themselves 3x to 10x the work. Instead of making a game they have to also make a game engine, tools, importers, converters, and tons of libraries.