Introduction:
Digital games, whether on consoles, desktops, or mobiles, become billion-dollar businesses worldwide. Games are playing primarily for sheer entertainment, sometimes as time pass, or for monetization purposes. Entrepreneurs, businesses, and big organizations invest in game development for varying purposes such as branding, marketing, and monetization/gambling purposes. It keeps the game development market always hot and demanding innovations, creativity, and tech-fascination. It inspires unity game developers to find innovative technologies, game development tools, and creative approaches to develop unique, innovative, and demanding games for various screens, devices, and platforms to reach a broad audience. Therefore, digital game developers are always looking high quality delivering game engines that can grant them game success in the market. Many game engines are existing and are used by a range of game developers with different levels of expertise. Some companies have created their game engines like Nintendo, Rockstar Games, Ubisoft, and Valve Corporation. Today two strong rivals are contending for top ranking in the game engine market, and those are Unity 3D/4D and Unreal 4 game engine. Before jumping to any fruitful conclusion, let’s know something regarding both powerful game engines.
What is Unity 3D Game Engine?
Unity Technologies had first released the game engine in 2005. Since then, it is rocking in the market by getting advanced technologies and providing handy tools in-game developers who always strive for innovative approaches.What is Unreal 4 Game Engine?
It is an incredible game development tool for seasoned digital game developers who used to dirty their hands and wet their legs in advanced game programming technologies.Selection Criteria
However, the game engine selection for your game development project is not something that weighs some pros and cons of both game engines. Instead, it is an exercise to look at the unique needs of your game idea or concept, game goals, and target audience who will consume your game after a hefty investment of time and resources along with money. Therefore, we have decided on some criteria that can help novice game developer to make the proper selection of game engine according to game development requirements, and those criteria are:Usability
For Unity:
- Unity is comparatively easy to use as a game engine for novice and seasoned game developers for a wide range of game types and platforms.
- It has a more straightforward interface compared to other game engines prevailing in the market.
- It is easy to learn because extensive documentation is available to deal with the complexities facing advanced game development.
For Unreal:
- It is a bit intricate game engine up front, but relatively easy and fast once the developer gets accustomed.
- The user interface is more user-friendly compared to the rest of the contenders in the present market.
- It is considered a favorite game engine for high-end and seasoned game developers who used to work hard on the coding part and design part.
Price Tags
For Unity:
- It offers a free personal edition, but the business edition has a cap of $100k revenue from the games developed using its tools.
- Unity 3D Plus package has a cap of $200K revenue per annum and charges $35 per month for an annual contract.
- Unity 3D Pro edition has no cap but charges $125 per month for an annual contract and offers support for all platforms.
For Unreal:
It is free for personal edition but charges businesses 5% royalty on gross revenue earned after $3000 from the games developed using its tools per quarter.Platforms
For Unity:
It supports myriads of platforms that hardly any other game engine in the industry covers. Apart from traditional game consoles and desktop games, it offers support for all major mobile platforms, smart TVs, AR games, and much more.For Unreal:
It has limited platform supports but covers most mobile OS platforms, game consoles, desktop games, and some standard platforms getting traction.Programming Languages
For Unity:
It demands expertise in C# and JavaScript, so if you have these skill sets, you can quickly jump on the framework.For Unreal:
It relies on C++ code, and developers with this coding expertise prefer this platform’s tools to go ahead in the gaming industry.Graphics
For Unity:
It performs average well on delivering stunning graphics, so you have limitations if you want to go for games with graphics-intensive. However, the latest version, Unity 5, has improved graphics capability a lot.For Unreal:
It has excellent graphics capabilities, and game developers love it a lot when they expect games with stunning graphics and backgrounds.Asset Store
For Unity:
It offers a prefab asset system where a reusable game object is stored in Project View and acts as a template when similar instances are in demand during the development. Unlike duplicating assets, prefab is not independently editable and makes changes in all instances easy with editing the master copy in the project.For Unreal:
It has limited assets, and developers have to create many things from scratch.Blueprint
For Unity:
It does not offer anything like Blueprint as a visual script.For Unreal:
It has a Blueprint visual script to create instant prototypes and final versions of games. Blueprint is a node-based scripting method. Therefore, novice developers who are not much familiar with advanced programming can easily create a stunning game using the visual interface of Blueprint.Conclusion:
We have seen the pros and cons of both platforms logically with some parameters. It may help game developers to make the right decision for game engine selection for each project. Suppose you have confusion regarding the selection of a game engine. In that case, you can come into contact with a team of game developers at SysBunny and get the proper guidance as well as the opportunity to create a stunning game for mobiles and other platforms.About Post Author
