Ok, I should have made that clearer. What I meant was that at least one post on a minor release of Unreal gets to the front page (at least when I'm browsing HN, maybe later or earlier in the day the postings are not on the front page). Out of curiosity I checked my above claim and it was wrong (hehe), but many releases hit the front page:

4.11 - now

4.10 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10548139 [75 comments]

4.9 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10147368 [50 comments]

4.8 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9694885 [98 comments]

4.7 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9103050 [88 comments]

??? (when they released UE4 for free) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9132815 [240 comments]

4.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7429774 [163 comments]

But it's probably as you say. Not every interesting post (which also depends on the readers interests, of course) get's to the front page. Coupled with the bigger mindshare of Unreal, and the not so interesting Cryengine releases in the past (especially compared to Unreal) we get more Unreal postings on HN.

The best way to affect this is to post more good stories yourself. You can also add a first comment to the thread explaining what you think is good or important about the story.

Tech isn't the only important factor with software, community matters a lot.

I've used Unity, Cryengine and Unreal. Crytek has some great tech but they are very deficient in supporting the community and Epic has invested a huge amount of resources into training, content, tools and even no-strings attached grants for devs working in Unreal. I'm not surprised at all that this has translated to more goodwill for Ue4 on HN than other engines.

Not to mention the focus of the game industry (and game players) has shifted towards mobile in the last few years. UE and Unity both support, and are heavily used, for mobile games, while CryEngine is behind on that front.

Even strictly just on the PC gaming side of things, Unreal's adoption rate among game devs is miles and miles ahead of CryEngine. Is it really that hard to imagine why the community cares more about Unreal Engine than CryEngine?

This has been true for years, idTech, while being arguably technically more impressive, was being written about far less because while it's ostensibly licensable, nobody actually did it.