Unity Vs Unreal Engine In 2024 : Which Game Engine Should You Choose As A Beginner ? 

So I’m not the only one who tried creating a 3d game without an engine then realized just how annoying it would be.

And I will now present you with the downside of this exact feature, performance loss... You can make the exact same game in Unity and Unreal and it will perform worse in Unreal due to code being applied in poor manners and especially because their lighting system is poo (too much ray rendering) For beginners Unreal does present quite a lot of advantages, but it comes with more downsides... From asset dependency (you can't use these assets outside of Unreal for example which means you are bound to the engine in a lot of regards) to target loss (games made in Unreal often fail to work on low end devices due to the poor base layout of Unreal and some of the features constantly running despite being unnecessary, it takes more time to fix all the problems Unreal presents than to just write the stuff yourself) I fully recommend working in an engine like Unreal or Unity, but know both come with significant downsides, infact these downsides are why most really popular games have their own gaming engine, like Baldurs Gate 3, God of War and many many more, even Indie games like Hades have their own engine quite often because Unreal and Unity are just not that good... But being real for a second, Unreal performs worse than Unity in many regards, which also reflects in the games made with each (and their popularity), the only really popular game for Unreal for example is Fortnite, which was actually booted to Unreal from a different engine originally due to the collab of the 2 game studios (People Can Fly and Epic Games Studio) to avoid paying the 5% fee... What I actually see is making your own engine as quite a valid point or looking for an engine like Godot instead which is closing in on both engines... The biggest downsides of both engines btw are their managments... Epic Games keeps pushing Unreal for unnecessary and new amazing features while ignoring known problems (like the VRAM being too little at random because of light tracking even with no assets loaded on just terrain) Unity managment is trying to monetize the engine for no reason... (Ima be honest I wouldn't mind paying 5 bucks a month tho to use it, like cmon its that easy) and avoids fixing known issues as well... Unreal has a lot of assets and features to work with without someone needing to write them, but they are all not written to work together properly and some dont work with one another and the assets are sometimes really poorly optimized... Unity has no assets but is completely flexible and intuitive when it comes to usage and there are tons of features you can just get a plugin for if you know how to... As you see both pose quite the challenge to work with in their own regards, but in general I recommend to just play around with either and find which suits yourself better... I prefer writing my own with some people out of them because its faster, better and more stable... No need for constant checks for problems or anything... (Saves time when testing for bugs especially, the amount of bugs I had to fix on Unity and Unreal is literally unreal just because some feature was not meant for a clear advanced usage)

@@patty4449 I agree that there are plenty of bugs in Unreal, I myself became a victim of transferring the project from 5.2 to 5.3, the release version began to crash at launch. But maybe it’s for the better, I realized that I did some things wrong, and now I’m doing it differently (not a fact that it’s correct), but it seems better to me than it was :)

Thanks for sharing!, yeah I tried unity as well I prefer unreal but both seem good

you are right bro. unreal's graphics is also amazing then unity but i don't which one is more easy so what your ex says?

You able to code games if you don't know how? I can't code either...

@@KookyPeanutAnimations5088 blueprints. very easy to learn. the gateway to ue5 cpp

@@KookyPeanutAnimations5088 just use blueprint

So would you say its smarter to use "Visual scripting" in Unreal then?, I'm not someone who enjoys Bug-checking like some people do, & i don't really care about making fancy visuals, I'm more focus on making a functional game that has descent style and world

@@God-T ¥

yes, blueprint(visual scripting) is completely good. the only time u want to code is code optimization if u want to squeze every little performance upgrade here and there

What would you recommend for someone that knows programming already and is fine with either visual scripting or code? I’m a CS PhD student and want to pick up game development on the side not just for game design but also to test algorithms, simulations, ai systems etc? I’m okay with learning either just not sure which tools to invest my limited time into if that makes sense?

I’m sorry they’re doing what!?! 💀

lies , unreal has blueprint , lumen , nanite , free for the moth asset , procedural generation , and a ton more . what Unity Offer ==💩

In unity I went through hell just to get my 2D character moving up and down a slope and behaving normally, which I couldn't get to work at all after watching videos and tutorials and writing lines and lines of code, I was feeling down and disappointed so now, I'm giving UE a chance.

LOL Do you still think the same after all Unity's betrayals? I'm so happy I chose UE two and a half years ago. The UE forums are very active and the out of the box graphics are much better on UE. It's good to take a few Unity games or videos made by gifted people as an example to show what Unity is capable of, but that's not representative. This just makes me say that these gifted ones would have done even more impressive with UE.

​@@killkiss Yes, because I'm just one person doing it for fun & not looking to scour forums for a solution. They did backpeddle on whatever mess was caused and CEO resigned i think. Anyways my answer was yes due to ease of use, because I'm most likely never going to fully learn it or make a game that I will try to sell. And with Unreal this would just be many more times difficult due to lack of guides covering every aspect of the engine.

​@@prototype21This has not been true for many years. There are many guides, including for beginners, without even mentioning the numerous RU-vid tutorial videos from beginners to advanced. And the forums avoid getting stuck, nothing is more frustrating for a beginner to stay stuck for hours on the same problem. Someone somewhere has already encountered your problem and other people have already provided solutions. And there's nothing better to have fun when you're a beginner than all the resources provided by Unreal engine (assets, textures etc...) with which you can have fun. I am surprised that there is still this type of debate in 2024, on the one hand UE has progressed enormously and has simplified (nanite, lumen) for independents and on the other Unity has accumulated errors.

You described the issue I'm having to a T. I came from Blender to Unreal, because I saw the strong potential in Unreal Engine. But here I am 5 months in and trying to put it all together properly is beyond frustrating at times, and if you run into a problem you don't have a clue how to do? May God be with you, because no one is going to help you 99% of the time.

@@yearight1205 , God be with you on this perilous journey.

Well I've been learning unity and c# for over a year and with all those tutorials, documentation and lines of code I couldn't get my 2D character to behave normally and move, run and jump like it should on a slope, so...

True, I think I prefer the old input system, today I updated the courses to go cover how to add the controls with the new input

There's a pretty good set of courses on Humble Bundle right now

I know a really good tutorial for unreal engine 5 from this year it's 1h long and explain every basic, it teaches you basics about movement and few other stuff. But if you are begging don't waste time on unreal, it's way too hard to learn from just one video, I would recommend unity for 3d games and godot for 2d games unreal is for experienced programmers and developers (godot has potential to be better then unity in 3d in godot 4.0 since they will make a lot of new stuff for 3d)

I think the path you'd follow would be to release on pc and hope for success and then move to consoles, which is what almost every single indie developer does. When you make the switch, you'll be able to use your revenue from popularity on PC to counterbalance the costs. Unless delusional enough to think that you're going to be some massive success from the jump, you don't have to worry about console for a while. A lot of devs (stardew valley for example) have other companies or coders come in and help with the code to bring it to consoles. Since he had the revenue to do that, after becoming popular on pc.

$2400 a year?

Should i give Godot a look?

@@Omnivoid22 If you want a job in the industry Godot isn't great. Because no company takes you seriously. It's like saying you work with Game Maker from YoYoGames. But if you just want to make some games that work and you can sell by yourself without a team of 5 experts and a load of money, then yes. Godot is the fastest pipeline right now for indies.

@@HalkerVeil so like if I wanted to go the mobile game route, I should go Godot? I don't wanna spend time on one engine and it turns out I don't like it or something. I have unity and started there but was suggest godot

@@Omnivoid22 It's mainly console that you might run into a few small issues with Godot. But they are starting to accept Godot from what I understand. Nintendo Switch did recently I think. Porting to mobile is fine. Unity is alright for the entry level. But once you get into mid and high tier you will start to see how bad it is from the back end. And if you want multiplayer of any kind, Unity is an absolute nightmare. If you want baked lighting that isn't garbage, you'll have to buy Bakery from the Unity asset store. Things like that add up and before you know it, you spent $1300 on parts to get your game working the way Unity claimed it could, but failed at. The reason Unity games have a bad reputation, for being bad, is not because the developers are lazy or can't make games. It's because they are working with a trash engine and are trying to get something viable working. So they settle for the stuff Unity CAN do. And that's pretty minimal stuff that Godot can bypass. Unity is Free, but not really. Unreal is Free, but difficult in the right way, and does what it says. Godot is Free, and easy, but laughed at by corporate. So if you are trying to sell to investors or anything high level networking with people. Or looking to make a portfolio for work later. Then don't use Godot. Although that is changing too given their recent trajectory.

@@HalkerVeil wow . Bust rust was made in unity and multiplayer is fine . Is there a list somewhere or a video that goes over these issues that appear at mid and high teir

keep it up same

none of these langugage, well C might be useful to learn C++ which you use for unreal, but python won't help. For unity you need microsoft version of c++ (buerk, some java philosophy mixed in with memory garbage collector, essentially killin the spirit of c++, as you can tell i don't really like c#). Also you must have heard the recent news, unity might no be the best choice as the trust between them and a lot of devs has just been broken... So yeah here is my tip, learn c++ and if u find it too hard, you can always turn to godot, it's a good alternative for small projects, with its own script language (gscript which will remind you of python, so you see i was wrong : python might help if you don't limit youself to the two biggest engines) and its own editor and it's totaly free and open source (godot is coded in c++, so it's efficient, as you might know unlike c#, c++ is a real compiled language, way more efficient than interpreted ones). About the level, not necesseraly very high, but undersatnding memory management is an important base you not necessarily have yet, if u code mostly in C and python, do malloc and free remind you something ? In a game we use the heap a lot. So first learn to properly use new/delete and then smart pointers so you have a good basic understanding of the code you write. Then learn things specific to gaming like animation (2d or 3d ? 3d it will be ? then welcome to quaternions ^^), lights, shaders, sounds, input management, etc... So yeah u not necessarily need a high technical level but you need to learn different fields if u plan on doin a game on your own (which i recommend, download godot and make a simple project, then a bigger one, etc..) It would be better if your game doesn't run out of memory cause it leaks, but for sure u don't need the same experience and technical knowledge as someone coding for some important software which might put people's safety at risk : Worst case scenario your game crashes or leaks memory, so you can totaly offer to copy paste some code you don't understand, that won't kill anyone, from that perspective you can start coding a game without really mastering all you do.

Unity is c#, unreal is c++ or blueprints

True I mention that toward the end

Unreal is great

did you ever figure this out??

no reason just decided to go with playmaker as I used it before

@@UnrealUniversity fair enough I guess, it's just that in 2023 that's not what people should or even will be using anymore

@@kebrus Bolt and Playmaker are different as night and day. Playmaker is much simpler to use, whereas Bolt is pretty much a less-developed version of Unreal Blueprints. Playmaker is fairly easy to get a grasp on using, Bolt and Blueprints are just as complicated as code. So, I wouldn't say Playmaker is obsolete, it just works differently than Bolt. Beyond that, Bolt and Blueprints aren't really that user-friendly. There is this myth that you can create a game 'without coding' in Bolt and Blueprints, and its frankly just wrong. Yes, you don't have to write out the code - but you still need to know the code and how it works in order to have any understanding of what the Blueprint/Bolt modules actually do when you connect them. Blueprints/Bolt cutout the need to write out the code, but you still need to know how the code works.

😂

Unreal

If you look at big game developers who use Unity/Unreal Engine - there are a lot more who use UE vs Unity; and if you look at game developers who use their own proprietary game engines, a lot more of them use C++ vs C#. So if I were you and my goal was to find a career in a big game developer company, from what I know right now, I would choose UE and C++.

Unreal if you want to be part of a bigger project, Unity if you want to start-up an indie company.